Phoenix Rises asked Bryan Young:

One could say that certain writers (Green, Steinbeck, Vonnegut) prefer succinct sentences and a specific conciseness in writing, versus the often criticized "long-winded" nature of writers like Henry James and Leo Tolstoy; in your opinion, what is the benefit of writing succinctly and directly? What is gained through sparse language that can't be gained via dense language, and vice versa?

Bryan Young I think both contribute to pace. A book with more succinct sentences will tend to take you through more of the story and more ideas in a quicker fashion, but that's not the right pace for every story. For Breakfast of Champions or The End of the Affair, it's difficult to say I'd want a more "long-winded" bit of prose, but take Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle and I wouldn't want the longer prose to be any different.

I don't have a conscious preference between the two, though I tend to subconsciously gravitate to the shorter and more sparse, but have no aversions to the more long winded prose. It is so dependent on the story and the characters and the mood being evoked.

When you read something in that sparse style, I think when you're done you tend to focus on the overall story, like a movie, but in that longer story it draws out smaller moments and that's what you're left to digest.

I think...

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