get to the point

"On a high shelf beneath a low ceiling, I’d discovered a single copy of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of Odradek Stadium. It was a novel recommended to me in a professor’s rushed, indecipherable scrawl on the first story I ever submitted to a college class—a literature course, not one of those dreary, impossible fiction-writing workshops. The professor added that I had the talent to be a writer, but that I had to quit rambling and get to the point. Twenty-five years later on the other side of the world, the book was waiting. His point had found me."