It is essential, and I’ve always understood it to be essential. For years I kept thinking, “What is a truthful sentence?” I was trying to write as truthfully as possible, but it was not sounding truthful. It took years—and years and years—of practice and rewriting to know that this is a truthful sentence and that is a truthful sentence—to understand it intuitively. It’s hard to describe what a truthful sentence is; it’s a very awkward thing to discuss. But it has to have all those things in it, and it has to be as direct…as…possible.
