Vanity is an author’s greatest sin. I hate it when writers show off. No word should be put to paper merely to impress the reader. Self-indulgence garbles the message. It’s noise. It stands between writer and writee.
I, too, am guilty of occasional showboating. It takes courage and practice to put complacency aside and actually speak to the audience—and I have neither the courage nor the practice to do it all the time.
I’m also not against flowery language or baroque styles in general. One recognises masturbatory writing when he sees it, but it cannot be pinned to a single, well-defined aesthetic. Simplicity can also come off as self-serving or gratuitous. Hemingway pops into mind—here’s the opening paragraph of “The Cat in the Rain”:
There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out of the empty square.
This would have been a beautiful paragraph had it not been written in imitation of a pubescent schoolboy’s prose.
The subtitle quotes Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the King James Bible.