She suggested it because I was way stuck--in a (to me unsolvable) problem with one of my chapters. It needed a lot less imagery. I love imagery. So me and the chapter were at a standstill. I was at a loss: how to capture necessary emotion without the pictures?
Luckily, my teacher was a minimalist writer. She was famous for this in her novels and short stories. I loved them but they were like a foreign language. She answered my dilemma with a list of books to find and read.
Like her writing, most of the writers on the list were also minimalists. A few occasional visual or sensory details. Imagine Old Man and the Sea but in modern prose. Sentences short and to the point, characters who didn't mess with thoughts or reflection.