Hot Topics: Purple Prose

Purple Prose – if you spent anytime writing you likely are familiar with the term. But what exactly does it mean? Well most its most basic level its unnecessary description, but at what point does your beautifully described waterfall suddenly start flowing vibrant silvery liquid while the rainbow sunset is streaking across the once azure sky? Like everything in writing the line can hard to see, but lets try and see if there can be anyway to define it more clearly.

To start out, if you are regularly pulling out a thesaurus – congratulations you are writing purple prose. And please – for everyone's sake please put that poor book down, you’re breaking its spine. Furthermore if you wish to make every sentence sound like it came out of poem – congratulations you’re writing purple prose. And need I add there is a reason poems are short. If in your attempt to find the perfect phrase you’ve developed a protruding vein or the sentence you just wrote won’t feel lonely on a shelf full of hallmark cards – Congratulations you’re writing purple prose.

All joking aside, though, that line can be difficult to see. What could be considered purple prose in one novel, can be acceptable in another, or in a different scene.

A beautiful description can bring alive the world for the reader. It can make them understand just why Josh’s heart skipped a beat when she saw Mary from across the room. It can illustrate just how creepy that house down at the end of the street really is. Description is a powerful tool in a writer’s arsenal. Purple prose happens when someone who doesn’t know how to wield it uses it.

Purple Prose-rs tend to both over use description (misunderstanding its purpose) and don’t understand how word choice affects the tone of the description (and therefore the story). They often think description is more important then it is, while undermining or not understanding why description is important in the first place. To illustrate this point I’m going to write two different scenes in the next two posts, one will over use description and one will have poor word choice and then write each in the non-purple prose way.