It was while reading one of Milan Kunderas novels that I realized what can be achieved by simple writing. My serious reading began with Salman Rushdie and then it kept hopping from Garcia to Hardy to Dostoyevksy to Dickens to all the writers who excelled in the esoteric realms. All these writers are or were the masters of their craft and they controlled their literary expressions as we can control our eyeballs. Whatever I know of writing, all these writers can easily be credited with it.
Ive observed on the Internet theres too much stress over cutting to the chase and saying your thing in as few words as possible. Good when you have to communicate a marketing message, but I hate it when they try to force it down your throat even in terms of writing literature. Im not saying you need to indulge in jargon slinging and redundancy just to establish your authority over the art of words, but if you want to say something in 10 words that someone else can say in 5, go ahead and use 10 words. Thats what makes it your writing.
The onslaught of writing help articles on the Internet is really misleading, to say the least, and its worrisome for gullible writers who want to swallow every nugget of knowledge they can come across. Two things happen: they waste their time reading the how-to-write-stuff instead of actually writing, and they get all the wrong information, most of the time, the most prevalent being, be as concise as possible. This is bullshit. Fly like a bird in the firmament of creativity and use as many words you want to use. When you are writing something, its not only what you want to convey that matters, it also matters how you present it.
And if you really want to learn writing, instead of reading articles on writing, read your favorite authors and learn from them through osmosis.
