# Seeking brevity without losing description



## Johnagram

Hi my name is John, and I'm a word-o-holic. Yep I love word-o-hol.  

I love to read sentences crammed with beautiful thought provoking terms and find modern books lacking in something they once had.  I set out to seek the killer and I believe I may have found it.  It's the common reader.  Lack of attention span, desire to digest bits of books during tiny 15 minute breaks, or lust for easy to read sentences which don't hurt their infrequently stimulated cognitive tissues too much have all slowly killed prose.

The beautiful and descriptive stories we want to tell have been mutilated and mutated into something meant to psychologically and emotionally manipulate the reader.  The masses just want the metaphorical drugs they've come to find gives them the release of endorphins more quickly than slow therapy.

But who was the dealer of these narcotics?  Well if the book publishing world is anything like the corporate world, and you know it is, then it came from people who have a job to do.  Slowly, if not subconsciously they urged the makers of the workload before them to become less cumbersome with notes like 'too wordy', 'make it shorter', or 'double adjectives slow the flow'.

It's not their fault.  Who likes work?  We don't work to work.  We work to gain something, and if the gains are gone then we won't do the work.  That's just who and what we are.  Somewhere down the line a desire to read shorter sentences and 'just get to the point' that's now shared by all if not just most allowed the concept of extreme brevity to slip its way into the mentality of editors, proofreaders, etc., and it became almost sacrilege to dare to flair.

Will I fight it?  Well I want to publish a book so how the hell could I even dream of it?  

Basically I'm here to get the weepy poetic dreamer knocked out of me and get the help I need to be one of these modern writers so I can get this fake universe of fake people screaming to have their fake stories shared with our real world out of my head and onto the page.

I seek this zen art form of brevity I've heard touted as the one true god of writing and figure out how to make sentences like the one below still say what I wanted to, but not violate all of these rules laid before me which block my path to victory.


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## Dan Rhys

Well, after teaching college English for 14 years, I am probably the king of word reduction and minimization, so if there is ever a passage you would like me to put scissors to, feel free to pass it by me.


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## Ralph Rotten

John: Part of the issue (the main part) is that writing is constantly evolving. The old eloquent style of writing is gone. Sure, we read it in Hawthorne and Poe...but those guys wrote a hundred years ago. No one writes like that anymore.

To write like that again would be akin to going back to silent films, or Greek tragedies where the characters simply tell you how they are feeling (rather than showing.) How we tell a story has evolved.


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## thefloridapoet

Welcome Johnagram!  My goodness, you do love words!  You could have probably cut half of that intro, but what would be the fun in that?  Welcome!  The forums are a great place to interact with fellow  writers of all genre'.  They are positive and constructive, and we have  fun things to do as well, it's not all work and no play!  Just get on  the boards and explore!


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## Foxee

Writing and editing flash fiction produces brevity.


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