The other day, I visited an online bookstore to see if an author I enjoy reading had anything new out I might have missed. As is usual at such places, there were several reviews posted about the various novels this particular author has written. I glanced at them only cursorily, because, frankly, I’ve never in my life read a single review that made me decide to buy or not to buy a book. Among all the reviews posted, however, one word of criticism of this author’s work leaped out at me: “overwritten.”
It’s a word I see more and more with regard to fiction. I’m always amused by it. So-called clean writing actually has very little to do with good writing—and a great deal to do with saving on paper costs. Yes, as every journalism student (and I majored in journalism) knows, this entire school of thought began with newspaper publishers who wanted to squeeze as much news as they could into as few pages as possible, in order to save on paper costs and maximize profits.
How did they do it? By ruthlessly cutting words and even cutting letters, too, which is why you will often see “cigaret” nowadays instead of “cigarette,” for example. No matter how weird the former might look, the latter has two extra letters. That takes up space on paper that costs money—and all that space adds up and eats into profits. Eventually, news style manuals sprang up to keep print reporters straight about all these new rules. Print reporters were taught, as well, to use the “inverted pyramid” of who, what, where, when, why, and how—and, above all, to keep it pithy. No bloviating. When broadcast reporters came along, they got their own version of these rules: sound bites.
So when did all these rules that were originally designed to save on paper costs for newspaper publishers and maximize profits start to creep over from news reporting into the completely unrelated field of fiction? I don’t know. But I’ll bet it initially had something to do with book publishers also saving on paper costs. Thick books use more paper. They cost more to produce, which results in higher cover prices. They take up more space in a book rack than thin books do, which means you can’t get as many thick books into a book rack to sell, either.
So fiction writers, too, got a whole new set of rules.
The trouble is that fiction writers aren’t news reporters. Fiction writers are creators who build (however reality based) imaginary worlds and make things happen in them, not observers reporting on what’s happened in the real world—and the truth is that “just the facts, ma’am” is often just plain boring or worse. When was the last time you read today’s headlines for fun, entertainment, and escapism?
Do you know the original meaning of “purple passage” (whence “purple prose”)? The definition, taken directly from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, is: “A passage conspicuous for brilliance or effectiveness in a work that is dull, commonplace, or uninspired.” “Purple passage” stems from the Latin pannus purpureus (“purple patch”), which itself derives from “the traditional splendor of purple cloth as contrasted with plainer materials.” So, now, you know the etymology of the phrase. Purple prose was originally brilliant, effective prose.
Today, however, when an author’s work is referred to as “purple prose,” the denouncer invariably means it’s “overwritten”—“too elaborate or ornate,” the Oxford English Dictionary informs us.
I frequently wonder if these detractors were newspaper publishers in another life. 
Some readers, of course, are perfectly happy to read lines like “The sea stirred” and move on. Not I. I want some meat on my bones, some bang for my buck—not single words masquerading as sentences and single sentences masquerading as paragraphs. So what floats my own boat as a reader are passages like this one:
“There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath, like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds, the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”
Overwritten? What do you think? Send your critiques to Herman Melville, in care of Moby Dick.
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[...] Funny how I picked this one today when it’s the subject at Romancing the Blog! For me, description MUST be inherent to the scene being [...]
Lol I love it! You get two thumbs up from me. Couldn’t agree more.
“So fiction writers, too, got a whole new set of rules.”
*sigh* I don’t like rules anymore.
Great post
– I keep thinking about my favorite book, Gone With The Wind – it would probably never see the light of day today.
Here’s a passage from a recently-published book that received lots of critical acclaim and went on to hit most bestseller lists:
“The gray dust of evil spells and the cobwebs of enchantment thickly cloaked the old electric arc furnace, and the jars of exotic rhodium and sinister cadmium and stalwart bismuth, and the hand-printed labels browned by the vapors from a glass-stoppered bottle of aqua regia, and the quad-ruled notebook in which the latest entry in Alfred’s hand dated from a time, fifteen years ago, before the betrayals had begun. Something as daily and friendly as a pencil still occupied the random spot on the workbench where Alfred had laid it in a different decade; the passage of so many years imbued the pencil with a kind of enmity.”
Anyone care to take a crack at guessing which book it is?
It’s pretty big, too. The HC edition I have is 567 pages. Not quite as big as say, the unexpunged edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, which is well over 1000 pages of teeny-tiny print, but not too shabby, either. There’s still demand for big, wordy books, and big, wordy books are still being published–if not necessarily in litfic, then definitely in SF/F. Pick up a Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind book and check the wordcount.
I think several different things contributed to cleaner prose. First of all, novels are no longer published in serialized installments like they used to be. Second of all, writers are no longer being paid by the word or the page and man, you could TELL that people like Dickens were being paid by volume–though make no mistake, I enjoy reading Dickens, but damn, sometimes I feel like telling him “ENOUGH, man! That story you got going? Get on with it!” Third, TV and movies have contributed to shrinking attention spans. Fourth, writers like Hemingway and his telegraphic style of writing were immensely influential.
But I think these influences are beside the point, because I think there’s a difference between purple prose and lyrical prose. The difference is, of course, entirely subjective. To me, purple prose happens not when there are large chunks of descriptive, poetic writing, but when every single noun is modified to death, often with tired cliches. Eyes are always “glowing sapphires of passion” or “flinty orbs of piercing gunmetal.” Breasts never just breasts, but “quivering alabaster mounds.” The girl’s hair is always “a cascading sea of chestnut locks.” After 20 or 30 times, I get it, the girl has blue eyes and brown hair and she’s amazingly beeyoootiful; I don’t need my head hit with yet another overused modifier.
Lyrical prose is different. Lyrical prose immerses me and makes me look at things in a different way; lyrical prose plays with words and gives new personalities to everything, animate and inanimate. In the passage I quoted above, I love the words “sinister bismuth.” They just sound good, nobody’s used that particular turn of phrase before, and in combination with all the other descriptions of objects, I get a very real sense of Alfred’s work area, one that goes beyond the physical. But if the author went on to call every piece of hardware and bit of metal in the workshop “sinister” or “menacing” or “puerile” or whatever other adjectives came into his head throughout the book, I’d feel very differently about the passage and the book in general. I’d also feel very different if I read book upon book describing bismuth as “sinister.” I’d want to say “Find your own words to describe bismuth.”
But like I said above, one person’s purple prose is another one’s lyrical passage.
Wow. I need to proofread better. That bismuth? It ain’t sinister. It’s stalwart, damn your eyes!
I’ll admit that I’ve read books based on reviews. I got hooked on Christina Dodd and Judith Ivory thanks to Mrs. Giggles, and reviews at AAR led me to Connie Brockway and Loretta Chase. But a bad review has never kept me from reading a book I was already interested in, or an author I already really like. In fact, I usually refuse to read reviews of books from my autobuys because the things the reviewer points out detract from my enjoying the book. And I hate that!
Anyway, about the purple issue, I don’t care whether a book is “purple” or not. My thoughts are, long descriptions are wonderful when they’re done well. I LOVE books like that! Actually, until I started reading online reviews I had never heard of what “purple prose” was. And from what I can tell, my romance-reading friends don’t know or care about that either. I’m the only one who comes online of the three of us. But the books that we all recommend to each other have, what I think, is great writing. And over-the-top and grandiose writing is sometimes more emotionally charging. So I think Rebecca Brandewyne is right, it isn’t readers who don’t want books to be long and descriptive (in a non-boring way), it must be about publishers. It’s hard though, because when an author doesn’t do it right I feel like skimming over some parts. I don’t choose her books again, and she’s labeled as “boring” in my mind. But when the author DOES do it right, all the words come together so beautifully I am drawn into their world. It’s like magic, which sounds cheesy but I can’t think of how else to describe it. I’ll read anything by authors like that.
What some reviewers pan as ‘purple’ I often find marvelously evocative and lyrical. Pick up a Pat Conroy novel and you’ll find some passages that are so sumptuous you want to dive in and swallow them whole. His books are filled with devastating pain and often uproarious humor. In fact, I know of at least three times when I cried and laughed at the same time.
I agree with Artemis.
When I’m butt-deep in a descriptive paragraph and start counting adjectives, you’ve lost me. All the hackneyed phrases? No. Doesn’t hold water with me.
But…if you wrap the words lovingly in descriptive words which enhance my visual, you’re in.
Though not a romance writer (not HARDLY), Clive Barker can enthrall me with his words. And folks, he’s wordy. But I love to read his works. I feel as if I could mentally reach out and touch what he’s described. That is a gift.
Writers who are describing, just to describe or fill a little white space, give it up. You must cease and desist at once.
Can I write like that? Um…no. In fact, there have been times I’ve mentioned a description once and never again. Yes, I’m purple prose challenged. But at least I’m not trying to fit my square peg self into the round hole.
If you can do it, and do it well, then please continue. If you thumb through your thesaurus at every turn, you may want to rethink how descriptive you want to be. Please.
Grins*
Okay, I have to be contrary here. I am not talking about a particular author or book but the general concept of saying purple prose (or whatever definition you use) is somehow a good thing. To be honest, my reaction is – are you kidding me? Being lyrical and evocative, yes. Absolutely yes. Overwriting and and bad writing, no! The goal isn’t, or shouldn’t be, to see how many words we can use to make a point. Or how impressive our descriptions can get. The true skill, the mastery of the craft, is in creating the scene and the characters and the story in a way that is intense and comes alive but doesn’t bog down the book with frivilous and trite – yeah, I’m going to go out on a limb and use that word – writing. Isn’t it? I’d say aspiring to purple prose, to overly flowery or wordy passages, amounts to grinding your pace to a halt and losing the reader in unnecessary extras that don’t have anything to do with good storytelling or good writing. Isn’t purple prose what’s wrong with all those early romances we all talk about? What people complain about when they make stereotypical statements about romance books? What am I missing?
One of my favorite books is ‘The God of Small Things’; the writing is so lush and sensuous it almost overwhelms you.
But it’s harder to write well lushly than to write well sparsely, I think. Because as HelenKay so aptly pointed out, it’s easy to fall into the purple prose syndrome.
Dittoing everything HK said and bless her being more succinct and less harsh than I would have been.
Sharon…thanks!
Steph…I think we need rules for the mechanics of writing and that lines or series written by multiple authors need rules because those are promising readers a specific type of book. But for single titles, I can’t see a great need for a lot of rules beyond the mechanics. We all know good books routinely break “the rules.”
Candy…yes, one reader’s purple prose is indeed another reader’s lyrical passage. Opinions of books are always subjective, and each reader always brings his/her own experiences and expectations to a novel, as well.
Artemis…It varies by publisher. Some publishers are happy to do thick books. Other publishers tell writers to either cut words or face higher cover prices, and that’s always a difficult decision, since you want to tell your story the way you think best, but you don’t want a costly cover price, either.
Crystal…as with all things, I think it’s a matter of finding the right balance.
Helen…I’m not advocating throwing in a million adjectives and adverbs or rhapsodizing for pages about a tree or a shrub. On the other hand, I do believe the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction when writers are going through manuscripts and ruthlessly stripping away every single adjective and/or adverb and chopping up every sentence that has more than five words in it. By today’s standards, many classic writers (like Melville) would be considered writers of purple prose. Gone With the Wind, for instance, is a prime example of a romance many critics would label overwritten and overblown. Yet many other readers would call it the greatest romance ever written. As it is with all books, it’s a subjective call. But like Steph, I’m not sure if GWTW would be published today. I’d like to think it would. I believe the early romances to which you were referred were criticized for the exact same reason romances are today: primarily because they’re fiction written by women, for women, and fling open the bedroom door to let women inside. I can think of many romances from the 70s and 80s that were very well written and are still on my keeper shelves.
Jennifer…I’m not so sure that either way of writing is easier.
Lush writers do run the risk of overwriting—but equally, sparse writers run the risk of under writing, which is something we don’t usually examine as writers. We talk a lot about when writing is too much, but rarely ever about when writing is too little.
Purple prose by its very definition implies that it is a bad thing. I don’t know how there can be such a thing as “good purple prose”.
I also find it interesting that all of the examples of this elusive “good purple prose” are books that are not romances. I personally appreciate lyrical writing no matter the genre. Laura Kinsale comes to mind as a writer who is very gifted with writing lyrically, but avoiding the dreaded purple prose.
Absolutely lush, or purple prose, can be overdone — much like adding too much spice to a rich stew detracts from, rather than enhances, the flavor. Like all other writing, it takes skill to achieve descriptive balance.
What HelenKay said
Lyrical writing will hit me in a positive way every single time – but if the author starts wallowing in Purple Prose Lake? Forget it. I don’t need 25 pages describing a thunderstorm. I just don’t. It’s unnecessary filler in my mind, and after a while dragging it out just gets silly. The whole practice tends to leave me so exhausted (wading through that nonsense is hard work!), that more often than that I’ll give up on the story long before the finish line.
I know every reader is different – but I read the romance for the romance first. Give me the characters. Give me some conflict. Wow me with witty dialouge. Don’t fill it up with a endless descriptions that go on tediously for chapters on end.
Rebecca – I understand you’re not saying throw “in a million adjectives” etc. in the strict sense. But, you do seem to be advocating a style of writing that a lot of romance writers are trying to put away forever. And, I have to say I can’t think of one romance I’ve read recently (or possibly, ever) that I thought was too cut down or suffered due to incomplete descriptions or shortened prose. Many had problems, but those problems tended to be no plot, bad character development, bad writing in general, lack of conflict – the usual suspects. I don’t recall seeing one and thinking, “wow, that needed more descriptions in order to be good.” Seems to me if the writer is skillful, only the words that need to be there are there. The reader is engaged and thinks on his or her own. The setting and characters take hold without being described down to the shoelaces. That’s an overstatement, sure, but in some ways not.
I can’t think of one romance I’ve read recently (or possibly, ever) that I thought was too cut down or suffered due to incomplete descriptions or shortened prose.
I certainly can! I had several over the past few years in my RITA batches that were nothing but talking heads. I couldn’t see a single thing. Couldn’t smell or taste or hear a single thing beyond the dialogue and the internal thoughts. These books SO did not work for me! It was like reading in a vacuum. Not a thing about the stories compelled me to read them – and I wouldn’t have had they not been assigned!!
Alison – what you’re describing is just plain old bad writing. The author failed in craft. Trust me, I’ve seen that over and over again. And, I’d bet adding purple prose to the story you’ve described wouldn’t have saved it. Probably would have made it even worse.
Personally I like vivid descriptions and writing myself. I like to feel like like I’m there, that the scene and story is not just words on a page, but its own living and breathing entity. Yes, it can be overdone in some cases, but if it is done right then I love it.
HelenKay, I think you put it very well. I want some description but I don’t want to get bogged down in it. I want to feel what the characters are feeling and I want action.
Helen…I’m not advocating any particular style of writing, just pointing out one that works for me as a reader. If you object to the term “purple prose” because it has acquired negative connotations, then call it “lyrical prose” instead, as Candy suggested. Like Alison, I can think of several romances that didn’t work for me, for those reasons she listed and others. Would more description have helped? Considering that in at least a couple of romances I’ve read, I didn’t even know what the heroine looked like, then, yes. But description alone is not all I’m referring to, which is one of the reasons why I chose the passage from Melville’s work that I did.
I love lyrical, evocative paragraphs that make me a part of the story world. If it’s poetic and well done, I’ll wallow in the description.
But if you go on and on about the hallway clock, I close the book.
I’m trying to remember the last romance I read or started to read that had purple prose. They probably exist, but I’m much more likely to set aside a romance because the writing has no depth: depth of character, emotion or description. And I have to agree that we talk a lot more about overwriting than underwriting.
Jorie – Underwriting is a HUGE peeve of mine. Not only description but everything is slighted – emotion, characterization, all of it. I know I’ve been guilty of this, a lot of times toward the end of a book, ugh, and bow my head and ask forgiveness.
Like Jorie, I can’t remember having read anything decent that contained “purple prose” in forever. Anything I’ve read that did contain the dreaded prose was awful, anyway. If the book is well written, the lush, lyrical description doesn’t come across as negatively “purple,” IMO.
I think we’ve just grown so used to instant gratification, more sparcely written, fast-paced books, that anything that’s a little more “elaborate and ornate,” comes across as purple.
But that’s just me.
I think it “takes all kinds.” I cannot say I prefer one style over another – it’s all based on mood and the skill of a writer.
Some very talented writers would only come across as ham-fisted if they endeavored to be more lyrical. There are other author who’d lose what makes them special if they tried a more sparce style.
I think what we’re getting into her is an author’s “voice.” It’s an individual thing and quite organic. If a writer drifts too far from the natural flow of their words, they lose that voice.
Very well done Ms. Brandewyne.
I hate the term “purple prose”. I simply despise it. I think whoever began using it in terms of romance fiction started the beginning of the end of originality and creative writing.
I read one of the comments above:
“Isn’t purple prose what’s wrong with all those early romances we all talk about?”
I would give anything to have another one of those early romances right now, instead I read book after book of mindless pap geared toward speedreaders who want to start and finish a book in the can.
When reading a romance today, I have no idea what the characters look like other than they are “pretty” or “rugged”. I have no idea what the scenes look or feel like, the rooms they were in, the landscape or terrain. All I know is I have man A and women B interacting to the tune of plot C. (insert one of 20 storylines).
What makes a book “original” is the way in which the writer describes their view of the story. I love to read Pat Conroy. He can make a simple action or scene visual to me, whereas most writers today have no clue. I just finished a book that had a setting at a manor on an island. I have no clue what the manor looked like, what the island was like. I have no point of reference for REMEMBERING THIS STORY AGAINST 30 OTHER STORIES.
When someone says a book contains a lot of purple prose, I buy it. Because it usually means that the writer knows how to embelish and use words to create atmosphere.
I remember every scene written in Woodiwess’s “The Wolf and the Dove”. I will remember them til the day I die.
The historical I read yesterday is already forgotten.
Give me purple prose…give me more of it and often.
Sandy C(New Bern)
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