Few words. Terse. Suggestive rather than descriptive.
On one side, the OP is right, the reader has to bring a lot of his or her own imagination to the experience. Some people enjoy this, because it makes the fic more interactive and because it covers a lot of ground in few words, it can be emotionally quite powerful.
However, sometimes a reader just doesn't want to work for their fic. They just want to sit back, read and have the story unfold vividly in front of their eyes. And there's nothing at all wrong with that.
And just as you can go so wordy that the story gets lost in the hunks of ponderous exposition, you can also go so barebones and sketchy that it becomes confusing and unsatisfying. I remember reading a story where I got to the end of it and I didn't know which characters were interacting or what precisely they were up to. That's not just minimalist, that's fail.
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On one side, the OP is right, the reader has to bring a lot of his or her own imagination to the experience. Some people enjoy this, because it makes the fic more interactive and because it covers a lot of ground in few words, it can be emotionally quite powerful.
However, sometimes a reader just doesn't want to work for their fic. They just want to sit back, read and have the story unfold vividly in front of their eyes. And there's nothing at all wrong with that.
And just as you can go so wordy that the story gets lost in the hunks of ponderous exposition, you can also go so barebones and sketchy that it becomes confusing and unsatisfying. I remember reading a story where I got to the end of it and I didn't know which characters were interacting or what precisely they were up to. That's not just minimalist, that's fail.