Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
The disemboweled mercenary crumpled from his saddle and sank to the clouded sward, sprinkling the parched dust with crimson droplets of escaping life fluid. Crow: You mean blood? Mike: Let's not jump to conclusions.
There are times within the life of any teller of tales in which they are faced with a most dire situation: the writing, while not lacking in such delightful virtues as a sturdy plot or elaborate characterization, is supremely dry and uninteresting to read.
The writer chooses to indulge in the hated writing technique of Purple Prose, wherein the work becomes much more elaborate-sounding and fancy.
In moderation, this is a laudable practice, used to some degree by the greatest and most honoured followers of the craft of storytelling. When overused, however, it shall cause a piece of writing to sound foolish beyond belief.
Named after a quotation by Roman poet Horace, who compared writing such prose to sewing purple patches to clothing (a practice common in those days to pretend wealth, since purple dye was rare).
Contrast with Beige Prose. See also Walls Of Text, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and Meaningless Meaningful Words.
An excellent example (which was originally the header for this page, and is a thing of beauty and confusion to behold) can be found here, on this trope's quotes page.
Prospective editors are reminded to please avoid adding examples where diction is florid but not intrusive— the sacrifice of Utility on the altar of Eloquence is an essential feature of Purple Prose. It is also recommended to bear in mind the nature of Tropes as tools.
Notorious offenders:
Comic Books
- The purple prose parts in the Cerebus arcs "Jaka's Story" and "Reads", are intentional. In "Jaka's Story"; it's meant to be written by an Oscar Wilde Captain Ersatz. The prose in "Reads" is a slightly more snarkified version of Sim's own writing; it's not purple per se, but it can be suffocatingly verbose.
- The Trigan Empire.
- A foreward contributed by Ralph Macchio for the 1991 collected edition of Avengers Legends: The Korvac Saga was a fairly pale shade of purple, in which writer Jim Shooter's time writing the Legion Of Superheroes book prior to this story is referred to as "distinguished scrivening", and every big storyline which had occurred in superhero team comics had been "mere prelude" to this one. It's actually quite effective, considering all the purple prose which is actually in this story.
- The narration of the four-part series about Biggs Darklighter, Luke's friend, sure does love overwrought metaphors. It usually works all right, but now and again gets◊ a◊ little◊ ridiculous.
"The next morning, Tatooine's sky is the venue of a fateful encounter. As blasters fire and men die, a desperate message is sent. A message that will transform the lives of those on the planet below."
— The Tantive IV is boarded. Leia's droids flee in an escape pod.
"Screaming engines rip apart the air. Like blood to a body, a gleaming transfusion of pure hope runs from ground to sky to the waiting frigate. For a moment, dead comrades and missing limbs are forgotten, as G-force slams them without touching their weightless spirits. This is triumph, hard won. The best kind."
— Rebels steal X-Wings and fly them to a frigate to take to Yavin.
Fan Fiction
- It is to great and heart-rending dismay that much amateur fiction based in the universes of other writers is plagued by this. Even otherwise good stories are brought down to the level of others with the insistence of throwing in little bits of violet verbiage ('eyes' as 'orbs', for one small example).
- Some Buffy fanfic by an otherwise excellent author who uses purple prose only in their sex scenes, referring to "pulsating manhoods", "throbbing mounds" and, oddly enough both breasts and buttocks as "firm globes." Go figure. Then again, it's also suspected that, due to the amount of purple prose found even in non-Mary Sue fanfic, there is indeed a reason why most of these people are writing 600,000+ words of never-to-be-compensated Buffy (Star Wars/Lost/Sailor Moon/etc.) fanfic rather than, you know, a real novel.
- The Kingdom Hearts fandom is worse. "Vertical. Meat. Pistol."
- The Sentinel fanfic is rife with descriptions of Blair's "cerulean orbs".
- Final Fantasy VII fanfic authors do the same thing with Cloud and the cerulean orbs. And if I hear about Sephiroth's flowing, molten silver tresses or blazing emerald orbs one more time...
- Many fanfic writers in The Magnificent Seven create very violet prose for the dialogue of Ezra Standish. While his character did have a larger vocabulary than the rest, many writers make him sound like he swallowed a thesaurus.
- Also prevalent in online roleplaying forums, particularly the sort where characters are animals. Try to find an online wolf or horse who doesn't describe his eyes as "orbs". These characters tend to be played by the same teenage girls who are writing all the erotic fanfiction.
- To make matters worse, some even penalize those who don't, claiming that it shows them as illiterate.
- Some offer helpful synonym lists, including such brilliant entries as "talon" for "hoof".
- My Immortal, where the author describes the details of every outfit to the "blud-collord lace" but then goes to IKEA Erotica for all the sex scenes?
- Spoofed to death in The 2006 Goku-Lytton Awards.
- In Death Note fanfiction, there are very specific words that absolutely scream "Purple Prose!" Some of the most worst examples: orbs, obsidian, chocolate (when they refer to Light and not to Mello), honey, and panda. Yes, panda. Most people should not be sure why L is a panda, but many people call him one anyway. And while some just say he has panda eyes, others outright call him a freakin' panda.
- The Neon Genesis Evangelion fic Spacedust And Chaos A Requiem may just be the Most Triumphant Example in its efforts to become even more of a Mind Screw than its source material.
Film
Literature
- Lolita is a justified example: the purple prose is Humbert's, who is trying to make himself seem sympathetic.
- As you might imaginably discern from the epigraph, The Eye Of Argon. Such protracted occurrences, unfortunately transcribed to ink-utterances through means of a character-based codex, were no doubt influenced by the minutely less prosaic and infinitely superior Robert E. Howard. People do not find themselves in possession of eyes in The Eye of Argon; they possess "organs of sight" or "orbs". Ears are "auditory organs." A decapitated head is a "severed oval".
- Robert Anton Wilson. The following is a quotation from Nature's God : The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Vol. III penned by said writer:
"Maria had been reading a chryselephantinely overwritten book called Moll Flanders in the coach, and very definitely she thought the somber, passionate, tragicomic and picaresque story was most absorbing, and certainly presented the dark, sinister, underground side of English life in a vivacious and veridical manner that carried conviction, but she wished Mr. Defoe were not so in love with ornamentally excessive adjectives and long, stentorian, and somewhat inchoate sentences that, even by the standards of the time, seemed to twist and turn through curlicues and arabesques and wind on and on through ever-increasing clauses and sub-clauses, including abrupt changes of subject and total non sequiturs, even if he did seem to be making a unique effort to understand a woman's perspective on the world, which was all to the good, of course, and it was less monochromatically monotonous (she had to admit) than the other one he wrote with virtually nobody in it but that one ingenious mechanic on the island, living in total isolation until he found that mute but ineluctable footprint; and yet it could all be told as well and be more pleasant to read if those sentences did not get so totally out of control and sprawl all over the page so often in positive apotheosis of the lugubrious style, and then she wondered if reading so much of such labyrinthine and arabesque prose for so long in the hot carriage had affected her own mind and she were starting to think like that herself, instead of just enjoying the shade of the oak trees and resting from thought in the dense cool quiet of the mid-afternoon English summer."
For those too lazy to slog through that, she's criticizing the book she's reading for its excessive use of purple prose. It's all one sentence, and at the end she finds herself thinking in flowery language too.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whom we recognize for the infamous introduction with the first words of which a certain entry on the very wiki you are reading is christened, namely the one as It Was A Dark And Stormy Night known. He got his own writing contest out of this. The winner is the writer who can come up with the most overblown opening sentence for a fictional novel.
- While the extracts from the private memoirs of Ciaphas Cain are themselves intriguing and entertaining material for the perusal of the common reader, the editor thereof, Inquisitor Amberley Vail has seen fit to intersperse his narrative with extracts from the autobiographical magnum opus of Lady General Jenit Sulla, who reports her early service under the aforesaid Commissar Cain. Her personal reminisces are inundated with meticulously detailed accounts of her devoted service to the Imperium and that of the women and men who serve under her. Vail, of course, does so with extreme trepidation, the prosaic nature of these passages being somewhat distanced from her own preferences.
- The Inheritance
Trilogy Cycle is simply filled with such a profuse amount of prose with red-blue colouration, that it has gone beyond the seemingly impassable limit of one more than two, or two more than one, pieces of "artistic work" that the moniker "trilogy" implies by the quantity of one.
- The queen of purple prose was the entertainingly deluded author, Amanda McKittrick Ros. Her works were ridiculed at the time for being so purple as to be incomprehensible.
- HP Lovecraft. But at least he had the decency to be genuinely good at it. Furthermore, Lovecraft often deliberately used arcane and obscure terms (such as 'eldritch' and 'shewn' instead of 'shown') in order to add to the creepy, ancient feel of his stories.
- Henry James. The whole concept of direct, concise wording which defined the 20th century writer (and really took off with Earnest Hemingway) was a massive, prolonged reaction against James and every other famous author of the late 19th to early 20th century who wrote like him. Just choke down the following tender morsels, if you dare:
Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. But she was often reminded that there were other gardens in the world than those of her remarkable soul, and that there were moreover a great many places which were not gardens at all- only dusky pestiferous tracts, planted thick with ugliness and misery. (The Portrait of a Lady)
Translation: She liked to daydream, and considered it harmless because she had a nice imagination. But other people reminded her that not everyone's imaginations were nice at all.
- Poppy Z. Brite, at least her first couple of novels. She not only acknowledges this, but briefly ran a zine called "Purple Proze", and has since publicly called herself out on the usage of such overblown language.
- Done on purpose in Calcutta, Lord of Nerves, in which an Indian-American wanders through a wrecked, but somewhat functioning Calcutta overrun by zombies. (in other words, nothing's changed. Literally. Except that zombies roam the streets.) A) She wrote it as if the main character was on one of those old style travel novels, B) The narrator fucking loves Calcutta.
- Dr. Edward Elmer Smith's science fiction, including his Lensman series, tended to fall into this trap. Doc Smith was well aware of this, and wasn't above poking fun at himself. In Children of the Lens, one of the protagonist's cover identities was a writer of Space Opera whose prose was even purpler than Smith's own. Given that he was born in 1895, he could perhaps be excused for having a writing style which was somewhat archaic.
- Edgar Allan freakin' Poe. Fall of the House of Usher anyone? It took longer for him to describe it than it did for the house to actually fall down. All tongue-in-cheek, though. Poe - who had more of a sense of humor than you might expect - mocks this trope in his short story How to Write a Blackwood Article (and its followup, A Predicament):
"...Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything—assert nothing. If you feel inclined to say 'bread and butter,' do not by any means say it outright. You may say any thing and every thing approaching to 'bread and butter.' You may hint at buck-wheat cake, or you may even go so far as to insinuate oat-meal porridge, but if bread and butter be your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say 'bread and butter'!"
- Justified in the first trilogy of Kushiel's Legacy - it's written from the point of view of Phedre, who would naturally talk that way because of her upbringing.
- Charles Dickens, although being paid by the word probably didn't help in his case. Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop was mocked by Oscar Wilde when he stated "It would require a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." Others have picked up this opinion too. It even shows up in Doctor Who, when the Doctor tells Dickens that section always cracks him up.
- If you take all the purple prose out of A Tale Of Two Cities, the book would be about 50 pages long.
- For a wonderful rendition of Purple Prose to rival Eye of Argon for sheer awfulness, check out the introduction of Blood and Roses, a vampire story anthology. Anything that features the phrase "ruptures the hymen of midnight" is gonna be gold.
- Lavyrle Spencer. This "comedy goldmine" thread regarding November of the Heart explains it all.
- Anne Rice, especially in her Sleeping Beauty books. Okay ,Interview with the Vampire, too. Add that it was written in third person.
- Perhaps it was rather inevitable that the inestimable author Steven Brust has fallen into this dark abyss, albeit intentionally. Paarfi of Roundwood is apt to compose long rambling sentences full of metaphors that flow away like rivers, falling down hills and curving through fertile plains before they, at last, reach the sea of consciousness. And you don't remember what the hell the whole thing was about in the first place.
- Robert Jordan is something of an egregious offender, especially in his later books in the Wheel Of Time series. Anyone who spends two whole freaking pages - easily more than a thousand words- on a pair of slippers has done too much writing. Or is attempting a Na No Wri Mo.
- Tracy Hickman, one of the Dragonlance original trilogy authors, was known during the days of writing Raven Loft as "the master of purple prose" and had everything as being either "heavy" or "looming". According to the annotations in, well, Annotated Dragonlance, his editor once found the phrase "loomed heavily" and came straight to his office to strangle him.
- Quoth George Orwell: "I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book."
- Thomas Hardy is an excellent writer, but when he does fall into this, he falls hard. Especially in the scenes he describes Eustacia inThe Return of the Native
"Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases."
- Stella Gibbon's book Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of writers like Thomas Hardy. In an author's note she says that especially verbose passages have been marked with one, two or three asterisks like a travel guide would mark places of interest.
- Bill Bryson thought this applied to the "most exasperating" Australian historian Manning Clark:
"(Clark) is an extraordinary stylist at the best of times - a man who would never call the moon 'the moon', when he might instead call it 'the lunar orb".
- ER Eddison and Mervyn Peake are the uncrowned kings of purple prose. The former because his faux-rennaissance style gave his endless battles, intrigues, murders, and subversions (the distressed damsel escapes before any of the male protagonists have even heard she's in trouble? WTF?). The latter because his solid wall of images and metaphors gave insights into his deeply strange characters that almost nothing else would have pulled off.
- Tim Rogers. He either believes himself to be the second-coming of Hunter S. Thompson, or he is gaming journalism's biggest joke. His writing is a fine tapestry of AuthorFilibusters couched in language like this. Reading it is pain itself.
- Foucault's Pendulum had a pathological aversion to describing simple action. The other novels by Umberto Eco, and some of his essay books, are no better.
- Despite the numerous aforementioned examples wherein the intensely lurid and potentially malapropism laden pith of the amaranthine compositions which this article is devoted to cataloguing serves to facilitate the general mediocrity of the works mentioned therein, it should be noted withal that to the contrary of previous examples, a merely esoteric and extravagant expository affectation contains within it the potential to bring about a type of literary experience which would otherwise be impossible, rather than sufficing only to engender the unequivocal condemnation of the magna opera here referenced:
- The quintessential counterexample to this lamentable ineptitude would indubitably be the short story Spawn, scriven by the incomparable P Schuyler Miller.
- And now, the lesson learned from reading R.A. Salvatore's description of Catty-Bree: no female character should ever be said to have "thick waves of rich, auburn hair". Or eyes that make men spill secrets by their very... deep... blue-ness. Hell, even the male lead had a "thick mane" of varying descriptions. After awhile he started to sound downright hairy. Makes you wonder what's with Salvatore and hair...
- The Young Toerless. The plot sounds interesting at first, and it isn't very long, but even the basic fact that these two young boys liked to sleep with a prostitute was stretched out for pages. And pages. And pages.
- Donna Gillespie, in The Light Bearer. As wonderful a novel as it is, the (multiple) sex scenes read like a stoned poet's wet dream. In some places, it in no way even resembles sex.
- David Eddings can write in Purple Prose (and, indeed, write a variety of accents dialects, and styles to spice it up), and he can do it well, but he's not above poking fun at it—the biggest example was in the third book of the Elenium, The Sapphire Rose, where a goddess brings the party to her domain to give them an emotional boost and some information. They wake up in her place, which is fantastically beautiful and contains nothing but peace, and all the animals there are gentle and beautiful. The descriptions are solid purple, and when the Goddess begins speaking to the party—mostly a bunch of straightforward, plain men—this happens.
They breakfasted on fruits unknown to man, then lounged at the ease on the soft grass as birds carolled to them from the limbs of the sacred grove. Then Aphrael rose to her feet and, after circling through the group once more for kisses, she spoke to them quite gravely. "Though I have been desolate to have been absent from your midst for the past lonely months," she began, "I have not summoned ye here solely for this joyful reunion, glad though it makes my heart. Ye have gathered at my request and with my dear sister's aid—" She gave Sephrenia a smile of radiant love "—so that I may impart unto ye certain truths. Forgive me that I must touch these truths but lightly, for they are the truths of the Gods, and are far beyond your grasp, I do fear, for much as I melt with love for each of ye, I must tell ye, not unkindly, that even as I have appeared as a child to ye, so ye know appear to me. Thus I will not assault the outer bounds of your understanding with matters beyond your reach." She look around at their uncomprehending expressions. "What is the matter with you all?"
Sparhawk rose to his feet, crooked a finger at the little Goddess, and led her off to one side.
"What?" She demanded crossly.
"Are you in the mood for some advice?" he asked her.
"I'll listen." Her tone made no promises.
"You're stupefying them with eloquence, Aphrael. Kalten looks like a poleaxed ox at the moment. We're plain men, little Goddess. You'll have to speak to us plainly if you want us to understand."
She pouted. "I worked for weeks on that speech, Sparhawk.
"It's a lovely speech, Aphrael. When you tell the other Gods about this—and I'm sure you will—recite to them as if you had delivered it to us verbatim. They'll swoon with delight, I'm sure. For the sake of brevity—this night won't last forever, you know—and for the sake of clarity, give us the abbreviated version. You might consider suspending the 'thees' and 'thous' as well. They make you sound as if you're preaching a sermon, and sermons tend to put people to sleep."
She pouted slightly. "Oh, very well, Sparhawk," she said, "but you're taking all of the fun out of this for me.
"Can you ever forgive me?"
She stuck her tongue out at him and led him back to rejoin the others.
"This grouchy old bear suggests I get to the point."
- China Mieville. Everything. All of it.
- Atlanta Nights. Although this is %100 intentional, as the book was intended to be atrocious.
- The Sheik. Though it's a romance novel written in 1919, so that's kind of to be expected.
- Here's a gem from Mike McQuay's deplorable After The End novel Pure Blood:
"[The rain] bloated the sky full like a fat goose, and when it fell, it was as if some celestial knife had slit the fat goose belly and splashed the innards onto the land in monstrous conflagration."
- So...it rained flaming foie gras?
Live Action TV
- Lampshaded in an episode of Friends where Joey 'bigs' up a letter of recommendation by using the thesaurus on Chandler's laptop on every single word, leading to a description of Chandler and Monica being people with big hearts being described as them having 'full sized aortic pumps'.
- Judging from the samplings at the beginning of every episode of Darkplace, Garth Marenghi's writing is full of this. Of course, Marenghi doesn't seem to have a very large vocabulary, leading to an awful lot of repeated words (e.g., padding out a passage by repeating "blood" over and over.) (And bits of sick).
- Played hilarously straight in The Big Bang Theory by "Leo", Sheldon's "recovering drug-addicted cousin" (who's actually a theatre minor) when he starts to decribed how he "was abused by a chaplain during his teens". Penny still buys it, though.
- The Australian comedy show Full Frontal had a skit where a romance novelist arrived at a police station to report a theft, which she proceedes to describe in full purple prose. While the cop is trying to work out what "sylph-like" means, another police officer enters saying they've arrested a suspect, whom he describes in the exact same purple prose.
Music
- In his 2001 song "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" Elton John sings a line about Purple Prose. The song's lyrics detail John's coming to terms with getting older, and his admission that he has "put one over" on his fans because he was unable to feel the music he was giving to them.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- Innumerable character descriptions on Furcadia. Use this generator to see some good examples of the type of descriptions many players endow their furries with, and try not to let out the contents of your stomach: "You see refractive colorless orbs flash with innocence 'neath cilia of ivory. The lamia rotates 'pon husky limbs... audionts alert and oculars a-ripple... fervid canvas of ruby tinge shimmers o'er her hale frame."
- Sadly, this trope is common in just about every roleplaying chat-room. Usually the worst perpetrators are young girls (aged 13-21), playing oh so beautiful and perfect characters. In any given chat, 50% of the people will make perfectly comprehensible posts, 25% will write with so many typos, misspellings and so much text speak that their posts are almost incomprehensible, and 25% will write with prose so purple that it seeps into the ultraviolet.
- Install the FlagRSP or MyRolePlay addon, login to any World Of Warcraft roleplaying server, and look at player character descriptions. They fall into either short and badly written without a single word spelled right, or a Purple Prose laden opus about luscious bosoms, voluptuous curves and delicate eyelashes, with almost no middle ground.
- There's at least one blog devoted to poking fun at such descriptions. However, "almost◊" is the key word there.
- It is possible to write a multi-paragraphed description of a character without being overly-purple - simply being detailed, considering the unfortunate limitations in the game engine for significant character customization (such as scars, detailed equipment/supplies, or any customization of pets/mounts). It's simply not common to see.
- City Of Heroes has free-text character descriptions built in, with largely the same result as in World Of Warcraft/FlagRSP.
- Everything Luke Atmey says. Ever. To the point that Phoenix has to translate his overly-dramatic, verbose ramblings to poor Maya, who's invariably left in the dark.
- Many of the line in Arcanum fit. Justified, given the setting.
- Final Fantasy Tactics was rereleased on PSP. They retranslated the Engrish translation into this. Many fans of the original translation deride it for replacing the Narmful charm with Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe; others deride it just for being overwrought. And yet others like it or think that its excesses are as amusing as the original's.
- Performing a special move, getting hit, blocking an attack, hell, even just walking during a BlazBlue match will cause the characters to start spewing entire chapters about what they're feeling at the current moment.
Web Original
- It's heavily implied that the unscrupulous journalist Vatsy, in the web original Vatsy and Bruno, resorts to this. One paragraph from the rejection letter that serves as an introduction reads:
We do not regret to inform you that this submission is unusable, unintelligent and frequently illegible. We do not regret that your mental seepage, poured in such an ungainly fashion on your half-cent-per-thousand-sheet paper, will not be gracing this or any future publication of the Writer’s Guild World Newsletter. We do not regret that you will—most probably—die alone, penniless, unloved and foul-smelling.
- This original story. The lead character is so full of it, his eyes are varying degrees of purple. Literally. Note that this is just one part of a chapter of an entire book devoted to this style. Her original writing was not as intense, but through revisions and alterations it became the purple-people-eating monster it is today.
- Here's an excerpt reads like a mixture of ADD and synesthaesia: "Her face had the fragrance of a gibbous moon. The scent of fresh snow. Her eyes were dark birds in fresh snow. They were the birds' shadows, they were mirrors; they were the legends on old charts. They were antique armor and the tears of dragons. Her brows were a raptor's sharp, anxious wings. They were a pair of scythes. Her ears were a puzzle carved in ivory. Her teeth were her only bracelet; she carried them within the red velvet purse of her lips. Her tongue was amber. Her tongue was a ferret, an anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger." This wonderfully purple excerpt of Silk and Steel goes on like that for two pages. Someone illustrated her; the page image is part of this.
- Virtually everything written on Songun Blog (with a touch of Engrish thrown in for good measure). It's a wonder the author was able to keep it up for so long.
Webcomics
- Utilized effectively with the deliberate goal of provoking a response of comedic familiarity in the audience, alongside a conscious acknowledgment of purple prose in the role of an artistic device, within the hereby linked Irregular Webcomic strip.
- Rocky of Lackadaisy frequently (and randomly) lapses into Purple Prose, often in the form of poetry. Rocky, however, is arguably the strangest and quirkiest of the webcomic's characters, and his launching into such monologues emphasizes that. Prime example here.
- The news section of Penny Arcade is often full of purple prose about Tycho's current thoughts on gaming, mainly in the form of very convoluted metaphors.
Western Animation
|
|
