Sublime

perspicuity

“Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it....

Language is crystallization of thought, so the stories matter, and so do the words.

He had praised brevity as a technique, but only briefly: in De Copia, as the name implies, more is more.

“Good writing has two characteristics,” a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.”

Blind leads—wherein you withhold the name of the person you are writing about and reveal it after a paragraph or two—range from slightly cheap to very cheap.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.

If the reader is lost, it’s usually because the writer hasn’t been careful enough.