In this case for the sentence to "work" is that it's confusing, anything that creates the effect (explicitly wanted or not) works. Like the single sentence of a program participating to an obfuscation programming context must work in order to create confusion. I left the artistic part of the process out of the post because in the artistic process the similarities are very far, IMHO. I think I use a creative process while programming as well, but is not alike to the one used to write.
He does not consider that writing is an art form, a means of creative expression, not just to get you idea across. For instance, one of the greatest novels "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands" is confusing and hard to read.