Clear writing is simple writing.
Writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete.
Is this true? Or is this true only if your main objective is to make something people want? That is, to make money. Because obviously, Proust didn’t write like that. And some people in some places at some time period “wanted Proust”.
Most people don’t work on start-ups. They don’t work on “an idea that, at present, isn’t wanted, but when people will understand they can make money with it, will be wanted”. Again, most people don’t work on start-ups.
I don’t see why good writing should be simple, it should be suited to your content and your audience. James Joyce, Marcel Proust or Whitehead and Russell in Principia; that is not simple writing.
Is the only reason to write simply when one is trying to express a general idea about the best way to come up with start-up ideas to make money? Of course not. For non-fiction, simple writing is probably fine. For fiction, it’s not. The thing is, good non-fiction verges on fiction. For example, take A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The line is blurred. Being clear is only important, internally, when the main goal is to be clear. Often the goal is to explore, rather than clarify.
“All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.”