In case you don't know, I'm still writing. I'm finishing up two books, after which I plan to revise two of my other books.
You may have noticed that my books are getting shorter and shorter. That's not accidental. There's a major difference between a good book and a great book, in my opinion. Good books come and go, but rare indeed are those that stay fixed in our minds. As a student at Biola and Talbot, I will never forget certain required textbooks: Frazer's Behind the Ranges, Trueblood's The Idea of a College, and Allen's Missionary Methods: Saint Paul's Or Ours? to name but three. Often the great books are not those that are longest or most arduous. They are the ones that speak with relevance and get to the point.
It's easy for those of us who write to substitute length for strength. A woman who had listened to the great Welsh preacher John Owen was once asked about his sermons. She said, "Well, sometimes he's so long setting the table, I have lost my appetite for the meal."
Two of the most recent beginning Greek grammars are about 600 pages. Yes, I said beginning grammars. I loved how Jesus spoke. He cut it straight. He used plain language. Occasionally he used humor. You didn't have to be trained as a rabbit to understand what he had to say. Jesus's Sermon on the Mount is a great example. There's not a wasted word here. And the depth? Oh my, the depth. R. C. Sproul once said that a great preacher is like an iceberg. You may see only 10 percent, but underneath you sense the 90 percent. Simplicity gets attention. No, I'm not talking about being simple AND simplistic. There's enough of that kind of writing out there today. I'm talking about writing that is both simple and deep.
I hope I don't forget this as I enter the last phase of my writing career. I hope I can still maximize information density while minimizing the clutter. I have found that being concise takes a lot more skill than being verbose. That's because it doesn't have fluff or unnecessary details. Concise books are also incredibly fun to write. It doesn't bog down while retaining all the great hallmarks of a good book. I want to write books that anybody can read and be genuinely interested in. Which means writing concisely even when no one else does.