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write in short declarative sentences because he thinks simplicity and directness a moral as much as an aesthetic virtue. He may under-write with the complacency of the over-writers of other eras, or he may over-write with the faith that the wider he casts his net, the more likely he'll catch something that at least looks true~slippery fish! . . . However he writes~simply or elaborately, in gruff Anglo-Saxon or silken latinism~he uses style and syntax, vocabulary and grammar as tools, or weapons, to capture reality~of circumstance, of personality, the hidden thoughts and more deeply hidden feelings, the dark heart, in every person, the traumas and farces of human relationships. 
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What is odd is that, for all his effective writing, he may be haunted by a fear (and the fear can deepen with the very power of the writing) that, no matter how careful he is, no matter how conscientious, at bottom he's something of a fraud~that, far from capturing "truth," he has simply created one more convincing deception. He wonders if he isn't just a better liar than other people, or other writers. If he has a conscience he may feel guilty; may even go back over his writing like an especially unforgiving editor, and test it~not for literary effectiveness but by that tougher and exacting, that more perilous, standard: truthfulness. More perilous, the reader may well wonder? Isn't truthfulness what writing, in the end, is all about? How can making a piece of writing more truthful be "perilous"? To which I will only suggest, like the serpent in the garden: "What if the point of literary writing never was truthfulness,  |
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