• idunnololz@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I write concise until i started giving fiction writing a try. Suddenly writing concise was a negative :x (not always obviously but a lot of times I found that I wrote too concise).

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      IDK that kinda depends on the writer and their style. Concise is usually a safe bet for easy reading, but doesn’t leave room for a lot of fancy details. When I think verbose vs concise I think about Frank Herbert and Kurt Vonnegut for reference.

      • idunnololz@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        It’s not. I just wrote the comment because it was relevant to recent events for me.

        I started practicing writing non-fiction recently as a hobby. While writing non-fiction, I noticed that being concise 100% of the time is not good. Sometimes I did want to write concisely, other times I did not. When I was reading my writing back, I realized how deliberate you had to be about how much or how little detail you gave. It felt like a lot of rules of English went out the window. 100% grammatical correctness was not necessary if it meant better flow or pacing. Unnecessary details and repetition became tools instead of taboo. The whole experience felt like I was painting with words and as long as I can give the reader the experience I want nothing else mattered.

        It really highlighted the contrast between fiction and non-fiction writing. It was an eye-opening experience.

        • TheFonz@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I’d be careful with this one. Being verbose in non-fiction does not produce good writing automatically. In my opinion the best writers in the world have an economy of words but are still eloquent and rich in their expression

          • idunnololz@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            Of course being verbose doesn’t mean your writing is good. It’s just that you need to deliberately choose when to be more verbose and when to give no description at all. It’s all about the experience you want to craft. If you write about how mundane a character’s life is, you can write out their day in detail and give your readers the experience of having such a life, that is if that was your goal. It all depends on the experience you want to craft and the story you want to tell.

            To put my experience more simply, I did not realize how much of an art writing could be and how little rules there were when you write artistically/creatively.