We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.
British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald
Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.
You can suffocate a thought by expressing it with too many words.
They write them long because they can't write them short.
The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!
What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.
It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.
This is going to take a while. I'm a fantasy author. We have trouble with the concept of brevity.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
My scripts are possibly too talkative.
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.
Being able to write an idea down succinctly doesn't make that idea any better than one which rambles on a bit. It just comes to the point sooner.
I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.
A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.
I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and more reader abandonment.
I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.
He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.
I'm not Cormac McCarthy, but I can get my point across in a thousand words.
