Purple prose -- and proud of it

I don't do Beige Prose. Purple Prose is where my writing is at. I wouldn't say I'm at a shade of deepest, most intense purple, but it at least has a fair lavender hue. And I'm not going to change. I enjoy words too much. I enjoy painting beautiful pictures with them. I love description. I've tried to write sparer, barer stuff, and it just doesn't flow for me.

I think, also, that purple prose gets a bad rap because it's easy to do badly, and atrocious flowery prose is unbearable. Done well — of course, that's still a subjective measure — it can be a thing of beauty.

Who's with me? Who else writes like this? Who else likes reading things like this? Or, in fact, please feel free to disagree with me utterly!

You nailed it - I enjoy it when done well. Not all tropes are bad, and I expand that to mean that all tropes have a place, too.

No, you illiterate goatfuckers, I do not masturbate with a thesaurus while writing. Just because your parents considered "acquaintanceship" to be 'a big word' and hence lacked the capacity to raise you to love and honour your mother tongue doesn't mean we were all thus neglected.

Yes, I know that's unfair of me, but I'm fucking sick of being accused of 'showing off'.

Oi! What about those of us who do masturbate with thesauri whilst writing? It really is a wonderful way to concentrate the mind.

I do this when I feel it fits the mood. I try not to make the sentences run too long, though. You know, the kind of sentence that is so complicated that when you finished reading it, you forgot how it even started.

It has its place. I do it more when I'm trying to get into a character's mindset and that character tends to the poetic or romantic anyway.

Sometimes I go on etymological word hunts. In fact, the extent to which I find myself trying to be as precise as possible in the meaning of every little phrase is often a decent indicator of how interested I am in a work.

Sometimes, especially efficient phrases are concise enough to come across as beige prose, albeit via very illustrious verbiage.

Heh. My mother once creeped out an entire neighborhood when she came up with a particularly interesting mental image to use in a bit of flavor text for one of her sculptures: "A bubble of significance." I think I take after her sometimes.

I use prose that tends to be purplish every once and a while. Mainly I use it for describing things, but I usually tend to keep it to a paragraph in length so YMMV on whether it is Purple Prose or not.

I occasionally drag a bit of Purple Prose into my writing in descriptions or philosophical narrative. Although I have trouble writing at either extreme- it settles somewhere on the upper register of complexity.

Some of the time I do like the Purple Prose. Especially in these vivid moments of beauty, whether contemplated and enjoyed by a character, or shared between two characters. But above all I wouldn't want readers to be lost amongst tumultuous emotion and so I go for making my words a subtle poetry.

I think it's better for the words to provoke a reader to form her own picture, rather than the picture being encased in the words. Much more flavour that way.

edited 22nd Oct '10 8:09:48 AM by QQQQQ

I don't do giant sentences and I don't do interminable paragraphs — as I said, I'm really more lavender than purple in my writing. It's still a bit much for some readers ;)

Yep, Tropes Are Not Bad indeed. Purple Prose is fine, but the Sturgeon's Law is sadly always present.

edited 22nd Oct '10 10:16:50 AM by heartlessmushroom

As it is everywhere. Beige prose when bad is dust; purple prose when bad is treacle.

I'm a comic writer heavily influenced by Stan Lee. All my prose has been tinted purple through the red spark of inspiration and the blue blazes of creativity!

I use purple for fancy scenes and beige for the "get to the point already" scenes.

Purple : Final Boss fight :o!!!

Beige : So there's this toilet...

edited 22nd Oct '10 8:08:46 PM by Edmania

Morven, what I've read of your writing, I wouldn't call it purple at all.

It's not a question of beige or purple. It's a question of the right word doing the right task.

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." Mark Twain said that.

@OP: Agreed, there's nothing wrong with getting pretty. It's just been done so badly so often that there's a backlash against it, to the point where writers feel the need to streamline their works, or dumb them down.

But sometimes less is more; I've found for some important details being very blunt and sparse is actually better. Hemingway was a master of this; so was Stieg Larsson.

I do Beige Prose too much - very often I get the 'talking heads' problem (the characters seem like talking heads floating in nothingness).

I used to write purple prose, but somehow, devoid of massive head injury, forgot how to and have been kicked into Beige.

I like purple prose when it's used well - it's what hooked me on Foucault's Pendulum, for the first thing that comes to mind.

Good Purple Prose is a thing of beauty, and I prefer writing that way myself (not sure how successful I am at it, though).

One of the main reasons that Gravitys Rainbow is my favorite book is how Pynchon's prose is so densely complex, and yet exactly right.

@Madrugada: hmm. People tell me that all the time. Perhaps they are those who only like the beige-est of beige ...

I've been told that I'm decidedly on the purple side.

See here (warning: offensive language)

edited 31st Oct '10 5:47:13 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV