Three Principles to Writing Original Nonfiction
19cousin_it
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So, I think your message has two contradictory parts:
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Write from your own experience, in your personal voice, and so on
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Write like this! Remove X, remove Y, etc
This took me a while to realize, but (1) is the more valuable advice. Different people's personalities are tuned to different ways of writing, and any trick you learned elsewhere and try to layer "on top" (yes, even brevity) can get in the way. The goal of writing is partly to discover how you write. Not how you write at current skill level - that probably just sucks - but something more like an idealization of how you read.
There was some book that a friend once mentioned to me, I don't know the author or how the book is called, but an anecdote stuck with me. It's about a guy who's trying to learn opera singing, and keeps trying to find some imagined teacher, "the man with the voice of a red bull", a phrase that came to him in a dream. Quite an image for an idealized opera singer, don't you think? Well, he spends years and never realizes that the thing he was dreaming about was his own voice - in a potential future where he chased the art in exactly the right way.
To me that story sums up what art should be about. You've got to have a dream; it has to be your dream, and it will suggest ways to chase it. To some people the dream tells to omit unnecessary words, to Nabokov it suggested something quite different. And to you personally, I guess the question is: are short sentences getting straight to the point really the most enjoyable thing about writing to you? It's certainly the thing that Paul Graham likes, so more power to him, but you're allowed to like other things too.
I was never a fan of this advice to remove all reference to the self when making a statement. If you think everything is broken or complicated and you don't think you have strong reasons to think you're doing any better than average, why pretend that everything is fine and we can just be authorities on the way that things are rather than how they impressed us as being?
My English teacher took off grades every time I explained things as though from a perspective as humble and precarious as honest, good epistemics require me to report; using terms like "I think" and "it may be the case".
Now, I could understand if the idea was that no one knew anything and we were all just roleplaying and that school was there to teach me to roleplay. But her defense against my skepticism towards non-subjective reporting was, and I quote, "there's a system for how these things work; it'll be explained in later grades."
It was at that time I was getting truly fed up with my educators. I will not lie about my confidence in my authority.
I don't read Aaron Diaz's webcomic Dresden Codak to learn about transhumanism. I read it because it's a masterwork of visual art with a riveting story. Nonfiction writing is about the ideas, not the experience. Get to the point.
That's a little strong. Nonfiction is about ideas, but we generally care about ideas because they are connected to experiences that matter to us (positively or negatively), and it's hard to convey ideas without conveying any experiences. In fact, this very post occasionally stops to do things that I would call conveying experiences, such as when you relay Etirabys's experience of you at different times. Arguably even you mentioning Dresden Codak in the previous sentences is evoking an experience. :)
Nonfiction conveys information.
Fiction evokes emotion. [...]
Though the ostensible purpose of nonfiction is the conveyance of information, if that information is in a raw state, the writing seems pedestrian, black-and-white facts in a colorful world. The reader, soon bored, yearns for the images, anecdotes, characterization, and writerly precision that make informational writing come alive on the page. That is where the techniques of fiction can be so helpful to the nonfiction writer. [...]
TRADITIONAL NONFICTION: New York City has more than 1,400 homeless people.
BETTER NONFICTION: The man who has laid claim to the bench on the corner of 88th Street and Park Avenue is one of New York City’s 1,400 homeless people.
(Sol Stein, Stein on Writing)
1There are some points here that are tried and true wisdom, passed down through the great tomes on writing, such as how to cut the fat. I especially like your thought experiment angle for coming up with ideas. I might give that a shot soon!
There are also a few points I'd be inclined to tell a new writer to take with a grain of salt. Limiting oneself to absolutes may damage credibility. “The best history books are autobiographies” is a highly subjective statement, and I’d challenge it. In this way, one can aim for “concrete” and land on shaky ground.
Writing precisely what you don't know is great for one particular style, i.e. the "this is what I learned today" style of blogging. And it can be great for staving off your boredom, but there's also the reader to consider. Some subjects and styles - and especially if the authoritative tone you call for is used - demand a writer who really knows their subject. A veteran who has seen it all and can comment on the history of things. Of course even that writer at the frontier of their field should always continue learning, both forwards and sideways to combine their knowledge with adjacent fields.
I'm largely with you in terms of Getting To The Point, though again, this is about style and subject matter. Nonfiction can entertain as well as inform or persuade, and as long as the reader is engaged, going on a few fulfilling detours can be fun/humorous/insightful. Some of the best stuff barely even has a point, or the point might be elusive (Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski). Intro paragraphs/sections from new writers can often fail to hook, but there's a place for flowery prose and humour in nonfiction.