Michael Wehunt: "Tidier" and "more concise" are so often wrong for a narrative voice. It's more a matter of genre, style, etc., and besides, we now have AI to homogenize literature. 🫤 Most writing "rules" are made to be broken...it's just a matter of knowing when and how to break them.

Disagreeing with writing advice about cutting *all* unnecessary words from prose feels so small in this rapidly crumbling world, but...writers, keep those unnecessary words if you want them. Find your voices and let them run riot with imagery and rhythm. Don't AI yourselves.

"Tidier" and "more concise" are so often wrong for a narrative voice. It's more a matter of genre, style, etc., and besides, we now have AI to homogenize literature. 🫤 Most writing "rules" are made to be broken...it's just a matter of knowing when and how to break them.

Neither Jane Austen nor Henry James could be called "tidy" and that's that on that.

James’s whole thing of depicting psychological and emotional complexity and ambivalence would be impossible with “concise” prose

couple years ago I saw someone make the point that always holding up “economy” and “understatement” (a la Hemingway) in fiction is a way of perpetuating a hegemony of WASP expressive idioms and 🤯—once I thought about it it felt so true

Yikes. My annoyed-at-overeconomical-prose brain is nodding eagerly.

don’t get me wrong—plenty of laconic writers whom I love! (Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, etc) but it’s the idea that everyone should aspire to Hemingway-esque clipped sentences that bristles

I bristle alongside you.

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