Do you like to slash your way through dense verbiage with your intellectual machete, marvelling at the lush lexical landscape, or do you find it heavy going being snagged by either the rich profusion of words or accosted by mysterious etymologies lurking in the thesaurian thickets?
While old-school descriptive prose may delight with its multi-layered richness, Hemingway’s literary vehicle, for example, is simplicity. He branded wordiness the writer’s evil. I’m somewhat guilty.
Stark yet emotive wordscapes describe reality with the same compelling candour as an impressionist painter’s masterly-measured brush strokes, allowing one to savour the singular metaphor like a Kadupul forest flower just uncovered at midnight.
Know the masters, then mix and match styles to create your own unique writing personality. Play lavishly. But don’t combine styles simply for the sake thereof – that’s tantamount to painting every room in your home in a different colour. Hunker down. Less is usually more. Even I’m learning.
