Agreed, a fiction writer trying too hard to put a specific idea in my head all the time is going to annoy me. Not all fiction all the time, though - Sanderson’s novels appeal to me in part because he is very specific about how his magic system works, while being more free about other elements. And not all non-fiction all the time, either - I love a good evocative phrase alongside all the specifics, it gives me a feeling to go along with the understanding. The aim of fiction, then, is not to achieve perfect idea-resemblance, but rather to produce the most beautiful or engaging ideas in the reader’s brain that one can, without caring too much how closely that idea resembles the author’s own.
Man, evocative is a really good word. Perhaps we can talk about “communicative writing” “evocative writing” instead of non-fiction and fiction respectively, so we’re not bogged down with genre categories or factual accuracy.
I used to mentally stick on writers like Tolkien, Fleming, Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick, because I had to reread their more dense passages multiple times, and even then it was still unclear to me what specifically they were describing, but eventually I figured their intent was more to evoke whatever associations each individual reader made, than to clearly communicate the same thing. So then I decided that some fiction should be read differently, more casually and without an obsession with clarity, unlike non-fiction or technical stuff.
Actually, it's William Gibson's cyberpunk writing which turns up the dial on evocative-over-coherent to 11. It's a kaleidoscope of words seeking subjective associations in each reader's mind.
There was one completely impenetrable section (Mona Lisa Overdrive, maybe?) the paragraph that contains "the armature of his pleasure" or something.
Man, evocative is a really good word. Perhaps we can talk about “communicative writing” “evocative writing” instead of non-fiction and fiction respectively, so we’re not bogged down with genre categories or factual accuracy.