Red Széll

And she said, bitty, difficult to get into.

Because it didn't have a unified voice.

I'm always rather struck by Ernest Hemingway, who famously wrote plain prose.

It's so lean, it's so sparse, but actually, The Old Man and the Sea is laden with words about fishing.

His book about bullfighting, you learn a lot about bullfighting.

So he makes those additional words, those descriptive words count.

They really earn their place.

And I think that's it.

Good writing is concise.

Every word earns its place and tells you something about the subject or the person that you're reading about.

Dull.

His hand shook so much that he couldn't get the key into the keyhole.

That, without saying he's scared, conveys it all.

This is the one that really struck me.

David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, once said or wrote, adverbs and adjectives are the cholesterol that clog the arteries of the story.

If you're just reading adjective after adjective after adjective, you're never going to get that sentence.

You know, a well-placed adjective or adverb works great.

But, you know, don't heap it on.

You can have intense paragraphs.

You can have intense sentences.