Purple prose

Purple prose is writing whose ornament exceeds what the moment can carry: elaborate diction, piled-up adjectives and strained metaphor that draw attention to the writing instead of the thing being written about.

The name is old. Horace, in the Ars Poetica, mocks the purpureus pannus, the purple patch stitched onto a plain garment to make it look expensive.

Purple prose example, and a rewrite

Here is a purple passage, written for this page:

The resplendent orb of the dying sun sank languidly beneath the jagged, brooding peaks of the ancient mountains, bathing the tremulous valley in a molten cascade of crimson and gold, as Elara, her luminous emerald eyes glistening with the unshed tears of a thousand silent sorrows, gazed wistfully upon the humble cottage where her beloved grandmother had breathed her final, fragile breath.

And a revision:

The sun went down behind the mountains. Elara stood at the gate and looked at her grandmother's cottage. The kitchen light was still on. Nobody had thought to switch it off.

Why the revision works:

• Orb is the vocabulary of avoidance: a fancy word for a plain thing. Sun is fine.
• Every noun wears adjectives. Jagged, brooding, ancient, tremulous, humble, beloved. When everything is described, nothing stands out.
• Her own eyes. Luminous emerald eyes is the narrator admiring Elara, in a scene that is supposed to be about her grief.
• Abstraction for emotion. A thousand silent sorrows names a feeling at a scale nobody can picture. The kitchen light shows the loss through one small, specific thing.
• Euphemism. Breathed her final, fragile breath is a way of not saying died. The revision does not need to say it at all.

The usual symptoms

• Two or three adjectives on every noun.
• A fresh metaphor or simile in every sentence, so none of them land.
• Abstractions capitalised into significance: Fate, Destiny, the Darkness.
• Fancy words for plain things: eyes become orbs, a walk becomes a perambulation.
• Emotion stated at full volume, like hyperbole played straight.

Proportion, not richness

This is a judgement about proportion, not about richness. Nabokov, Baldwin and Morrison are all lavish, and none of them are purple, because the intensity of the language matches the intensity of what it describes. A flat scene dressed in high language is purple. So is a genuinely enormous moment overdressed past the point the reader can hold.

How to fix purple prose

In a line edit the practical repairs are dull and they work:

1. Cut the second adjective, and often the first.
2. Keep one image per beat, the best one.
3. Swap fancy words for the plain ones they replaced.
4. Replace named emotions with one concrete detail.
5. Let the plainest sentence in the paragraph carry the most important fact.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it called purple prose?

The phrase goes back to Horace, who in the Ars Poetica mocked the purple patch, a bright scrap of costly purple cloth stitched onto a plain garment. Purple dye was expensive, so the patch was showing off.

What is an example of purple prose?

'The resplendent orb of the dying sun sank languidly beneath the brooding peaks' is purple: three decorations on a sunset that the scene does not need. 'The sun went down behind the mountains' carries the same fact.

What is the difference between purple prose and lyrical prose?

Proportion. Lyrical prose is rich because the moment is rich, and every image does work. Purple prose is richer than the moment, so the language becomes the subject instead of the scene.