Dense, elaborate writing that piles on detail, digression, and linguistic play to create an overwhelming, immersive reading experience.
Maximalist prose embraces excess as a strategy. Long sentences, rich vocabularies, digressions within digressions, exhaustive detail, and a willingness to let language sprawl and show off. Where minimalism subtracts, maximalism adds - trusting that more can be more when it's done with energy and purpose. The goal isn't efficiency but immersion, building worlds so detailed they feel inexhaustible.
Even if you never write a 1,000-page novel, maximalism teaches you the power of abundance. It shows you that sentences can be long and still controlled, that digressions can deepen rather than distract, and that sometimes a scene needs more sensory detail, not less. Understanding maximalism gives you permission to expand when your instinct says a moment deserves more room.
Wallace uses footnotes, endnotes, and multi-page sentences to create a novel that mirrors the information overload of modern life.
Marquez packs seven generations, supernatural events, and an entire town's history into a torrent of lush, unstoppable prose.
Rushdie's narrator can't tell a story straight - he digresses, backtracks, and embellishes until the digressions become the story.
The best maximalist writers are rigorous editors. Every digression serves a purpose. Excess without intention is just mess.
Give readers anchors - clear characters, recurring images, a narrative thread they can hold onto even when the prose spirals outward.
Maximalism isn't about vocabulary flexing. It's about building richness. A long sentence full of simple words can be more maximalist than a short one stuffed with SAT vocabulary.
Pick a single mundane object in your room - a coffee mug, a lamp, a book. Now write about it for a full page without stopping. Include its history (real or invented), what it reminds you of, how it connects to something larger, what it smells and feels like. Let yourself digress. The goal is to discover how much meaning you can find in one small thing.