This post was originally posted on Tumblr on October 20, 2024.

This is one of the easiest criticisms to throw at someone: “Purple prose, almost unreadable, horrible, make it simpler.”

The problem is that some critics don’t understand the difference between elegant prose and purple prose. It’s easy to sneer that someone has purple prose because they added a few extra adjectives if you’re being very uncharitable. I see this a lot from pretentious first-year college students who believe that one Creative Writing class makes them a master.

However, there is a time and place for elegant, beautiful, ornate prose … and times where it’s just stupid and pretentious.

As with everything in writing, we need balance.

That balance will look a little different to everyone, but many writing critics don’t have the skills necessary to understand what each piece’s balance point is. Hence, they accuse everything of being purple prose when it’s not.

But purple prose is, unfortunately, very real, and we can all fall into its clutches. Let’s look at what makes purple prose so terrible and what we can do instead.

Why is purple prose so bad?

Purple prose makes readers work much harder to understand what you’re saying because it hides important details in a wall of mostly irrelevant text.

You want to show off how cool you are and you forget that other people are meant to read this for their own enjoyment. It’s self-important and disrespectful to the reader. Focusing on your ego and your need for praise will, paradoxically, wreck your writing.

Clear writing is good writing. People reading for entertainment (ie, people reading fiction outside of school) do not want to devote all of their brainpower to your work; they’ve got a million other, way more important things to focus on.

Your work is entertainment, and so it needs to be entertaining. Books that force you to translate them into Normal Human English are not entertainment – they are torture.

So what is purple prose, exactly?

It’s easier to look at an example and dissect it. Here’s an excerpt from one of the most derided books of all time, Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittrick Ros:

Arose the seeming deadly creature to that standard of joy and gladness which should mark his noble path! Endow him with the dewdrops of affection; cast from him the pangs of the dull past, and stamp them for ever beneath the waves of troubled waters; brighten his life as thou wouldst that of a faded flower; and when the hottest ray of that heavenly orb shall shoot its cheerful charge against the window panes of Dunfern Mansion, the worthy owner can receive it with true and profound thankfulness. Three weeks had scarcely passed ere Sir John was made the recipient of another invitation to Dilworth Castle. This second effusion of cordiality required neither anxious thought nor prolonged decision how to act, knowing as he did that it would again serve to bring his present thoughts into practice by affording him another opportunity of sharing in the loving looks of one for whom he feared there dwelt a strong inclination on his part to advance his affection.

And no, I didn’t remove any paragraph breaks. It is indeed exactly like that in the original text.

What the hell is this saying? Basically, that Sir John is happy that he’s being invited back to Dilworth Castle, and he accepted the invitation immediately. Ok. I ain’t reading all that.

Hallmarks of purple prose

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’ll give you an idea.

Long, complex, yet insubstantial sentences.

With purple prose, every single sentence has multiple clauses and goes on for three or four lines. But somehow it says absolutely nothing. That example from Irene Iddesleigh has a sentence that is SEVEN LINES LONG. And tells us nothing.

No action.

Purple prose is annoying because no one’s doing anything – they’re just talking about doing things. Half of the above paragraph has no action in it whatsoever. The next part just tells us that he accepted the invitation because he’s excited. That’s it.

Excessive description.

With purple prose, someone may take a full page to describe a room in excruciating detail before anyone even talks or does anything. You do not need to explain every facet of a place.

Double-describing things.

In the above passage, Ros explains exactly how Sir John feels five different ways before she even tells us what he is excited about. If you describe something twice in a row, you are doing too much.

Explaining every facet of a human’s state.

Tell us once and then use action to support the point.

Over-reliance on unique words.

It’s fine to use one or two highbrow words in a passage. English is such a fun language because we have so many synonyms for damn near everything. However, when every other word needs a reader to crack out a thesaurus, you have a problem.

Too many adjectives and adverbs.

With purple prose, every single thing needs an adjective, and every action has an adverb. This is overwhelming and annoying; there’s just too many details. Sometimes a table is just a table. Sometimes someone just does something.

Too many metaphors and similes.

This is a common issue with purple prose because it can’t just tell you how someone feels: it has to define it in 10000 different ways. It’s easy to get lost in a tangle of metaphors and have no idea what’s actually going on.

Essentially, purple prose is too much of a good thing. Everything is set to 100 and there’s no way for the reader to remember all of that.

What purple prose is not

To fix purple prose, we need to understand the difference between purple prose and good, normal, nice prose.

A few unique words sprinkled in here or there.

If you’ve got one word per page that someone may need to look up, you don’t have purple prose. The problem with purple prose isn’t necessarily the vocabulary itself; it’s the density.

Pretty prose that serves a purpose.

If you have plenty of action and dialogue, you likely do not have purple prose.

Small instances of alliteration.

People whine that using alliteration at all is a big no-no, but that is not true. It can add a certain melody to your writing, as long as you use it sparingly.

One or two long sentences per page.

We want to use a variety of sentence structures, which will naturally mean some of our sentences are longer than others. If you intersperse some long lines with shorter ones, then you are doing just fine.

Any adjectives or adverbs.

Sometimes you do need precision because you want to paint a picture. It’s okay to have an ornately carved wooden table, or a red glowing candle, or dappled snowflakes fluttering from the sky. The issue is when every single noun has an adjective and every single verb has an adverb.

Description.

There are people who genuinely believe you shouldn’t explain anything and that everything should read like a movie script. That’s dumb. It’s fine to have descriptions of things as long as they aren’t overtaking the action and dialogue.

You’ll notice a theme here: good prose has balance. It uses long sentences and short sentences; it allows for complex vocabulary without losing the point. There is proportionate description, action, and dialogue. There’s a bit of wordplay, but that’s not the primary focus of the scene.

Options to fix purple prose

If I were in charge of fixing Irene Iddesleigh into something humans would actually read, I would first down a full bottle of whisky. Then I’d do something like this.

Three weeks had scarcely passed ere Sir John received a sacred gift: a second invitation to Dilworth Castle. The very sun seemed to shine with fiercer glory as he regarded the succinct missive, penned on cream paper in soft-shining violet ink.

He vacillated not; before he knew his own thoughts, he had rummaged in his drawer for the tools of love. With shaking hand, he dashed off his eager agreement, adding a flourishing signature below the ten lines of text. This he handed to his butler, who gave a smile adorned with sly glee.

All who met him must see the fascination stamped on his face, Sir John was sure. Gone were the pangs of a dull past, washed away with the dewdrops of affection – so fleeting, yet essential to his sustained happiness. His very essence had bloomed like a faded flower reintroduced to the nourishing soil, ready to be plucked by that worthy maiden’s delicate hand.

I’ve tried to replicate Ros’s more late-Victorian style here, which does mean it’s more purple than I, personally, would do. However, it retains the spirit of her thoughts and preserves some of her more interesting similes. They’re more connected now into a larger metaphor of Sir John being like a sad, drooping flower that has now perked up and forgotten how miserable he was.

I also added more concrete details about where he is, what the invitation looks like, and what he does with it instead of just rambling on about how happy he is about being noticed by Irene-sempai.

Now, if I were doing this in a more modern style, I might write something like this:

Sir John looked up from his book when the butler entered, holding a small envelope with a weighty wax seal. Assuming it just another demand from his parents, he waved his old caretaker away, but the butler shook his head and came forward, smiling now.

“You might wish to read it first, my lord.”

“Probably some gala nonsense.” Frowning, he picked up his penknife and accepted the letter, then paused. Dust motes, floating in the golden sunlight, appeared like fairies encircling a script he had already come to love.

There could be no mistaking that handwriting: painstakingly delicate cursive, with elegant whirls as underline. Nor had he ever seen anyone else use violet ink for their messages. It could only be her.

Did he dare? Of course. Sir John pried off the wax seal of Dilworth Castle – a lion encircling a lamb – and scanned the invitation with jittering eyes that made the letters dance.

An invitation, only three weeks after the last: his chest felt full of flowers, his eyes turning dewy by the morning sun. How could he ever refuse?

“Get me my finest paper,” Sir John demanded of the butler waiting at a respectful distance. “And good blue ink. The nice Mont-Blanc fountain pen – none of that gel nonsense.”

How to prevent purple prose

Why do the above passages work better? Why are they more enjoyable to read? Here’s why.

Use shorter sentences.

One of the fastest ways to fix purple prose is just to chunk up your sentences better. It’s hard to create super ornate and overwrought sentences in under two lines, so forcing yourself to keep every sentence less than three lines will naturally cut out a lot of the bullshit.

Ask yourself what you are really trying to show.

What should a reader get out of this sentence? What information are you sharing with them? Then explain that.

Run your text through a grade estimator.

It sucks, I know, but if we want to have highly engaging content, we do need to dumb it down just a bit. If you’re writing above like a 9th grade level, you know you might be too purply. A lot of this does come from sentence structure, so fixing your syntax can help drop the grade level.

Keep weird words to a minimum.

I give myself a goal to only use one strange and archaic word per page. Sometimes two if I really need it. But I space them out throughout the text and use ample context clues so someone shouldn’t have to go look it up if they’re reading carefully.

Put action first, then description.

Tell us what to focus on before you elaborate with flowery metaphors. Both the fixed passages give us the details upfront. The second one starts with an action and adds some tension so we don’t quite know what’s happening before the big reveal, while the first one tells us immediately and then expands on it (a more Victorian thing).

Focus on small movements to tell a bigger story.

Things like someone’s hands shaking or their eyes watering will explain their emotional state without you having to tell us.

Include sensory details.

In the fixed passages, we see dust motes dancing in the air, we see the colorful ink, we feel its weight. This is much more engaging without being purply.

Keep metaphors to a minimum.

Metaphors work when they are interspersed with more action-oriented text; otherwise, it’s not even clear what you’re trying to describe. Pick a strong one and stick with it rather than cramming a bunch in at once.

Use dialogue.

Dialogue is more engaging and allows you to tell us things without just stating it outright in the text.

I cannot promise that these suggestions will keep you from ever being accused of having purple prose. In fact, I think everyone save Hemingway gets this insult a few times. However, if you adhere to these suggestions, you’ll find that you have tighter, stronger, and – dare I even say it – prettier prose.