My Style

[Herr Mullen]

Mullen, your example is a good point to make. In the english language there's no excuse to be so dull as your first version, nor so extrvagant as the second.

"This is sad," Takeru moaned as he felt the chill of depression, for he could no longer deny the truth: Patamon was in love with DemiDevimon."

Our words are clear and crisp delivering the message without being overly poetic. "dull knife of depression piercing his hopeful heart" can easily be reduce to a simpler tone of depression, or another contrast. The use of the negative in denial (he could no longer) makes an effective statement, and the use of absolute and concise words can increase the impact even while using less of them.

Do your additional 6 words (your passage is 32 words, while mine is 26) truly increase empathy for the reader, or simply attempt to use a device to try and increase it?

My point from that example is not that "mataphors are awesome!", but that the use of poetic devices can contribute to my ideas of narrative persona. I could use any number of devices instead of metaphor, but that's what I used in that example. I could use retoric:

""What?" gasped Takeru. How could this be? What had posessed Patamon to make sure a choice?"

Or, I could use a different perspective.

"I watched from aside my one and only, as my partner's face began to crack: first his eyes, then his mouth, and then his fist bawled, and the tears began to seap."

My personal favorate is to directly question the reader.

"Have you ever felt so betrayed, so angry with a friend, that it took a steelforce will to hold back your arm from pummeling them with all your might? That's what Takeru felt, as his clenched his hand and jaw, trying to quell his rolling tears."

So, indeed, it is possible to overexpress oneself into becoming obsolete, however the narrator's vocabulary, perspective, and devices are the things that make the impression on the reader: Nate Hunter uses the British spellings of words to create an atmosphere of class within his works. That's what I mean by a persona.

Have you ever been around someone so energetic, it's hard to to fall into their playful (and slightly embaressing) games? Or a guy who's so self absorbed, and quiet, who folds his arms, and looks down a lot, in whose comapany you can't help but feel a tiny bit fustrated?

The narrator is an individual. He will have the power to change your mood simply through his outlook on the situation.

Stories with poetic depth drown the reader and are painfully hard to read without nodding off. Sometimes they're too busy to find the meaning behind the words than finishing the tacky ending.

That sounds more like a reader's preference than an author's. I myself never read that way. I enjoy the book's plot and character, first, and if I read it a second time, I look closer at the text itself, searching for foreshadowing.

I myself am not a poet. I just write like one.