Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I think you’ll get plenty of comments on this one.

These days purple prose has taken on some seriously negative connotations.  You pretty much summed up exactly how I view it with your response to the blog entry. 

My thought is that too much of the “flowing auburn tresses” and “velvety chestnut colored eyes” only serves to distance the reader from the character.  I start seeing “Mary Sue” in big florescent letters.  There are plenty of other ways to describe a person without resorting to the sparklypoo descriptives.

The passage she quoted from Moby Dick was lyrical, but I found myself mentally urging Melville on with the inevitable “I get it already.  Let’s move on, please.” All I kept thinking of was Twain’s remarks regarding Fenimore Cooper’s work - “when a man’s mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation;”

I love lyrical prose.  I don’t like purple prose, and there’s a definite difference between the two. Sometimes it’s hard to avoid one while trying to achieve the other.

“For the man who sat on Rohan’s throne, palsied and diminished with age and sickness, was not the king. No, the king crouched, uncrowned, at the foot of the dais and surveyed the Hall with calculating eyes, noting this Rohirrim’s harsh words and that one’s disapproving stare, and another’s whispered malcontent. During the day he would slink through the shadows of the Meduseld, watching, learning and murmuring his spells into the ears of a fading old man. And at night, when the arc of the moon’s journey carried her to the far side of the horizon, he would stare out over the fields of grass, always towards Isengard, with a face painted in the warring colors of triumph and fear.”

I think I skated along the lines of the dreaded ‘urple’ when I wrote this, but the potential to really go overboard on the descriptives certainly exists. 

Granted, one person’s lyrical is another’s overused, cliched descriptive, but I like stories where the character is described with just red hair and brown hairs.  I can picture her just fine without the vapor trail of unnecessary adjectives.

Oops!  That should be ‘red hair and brown eyes’.  Geeze, just shoot me now.

I have to say this RTB column made me nutty.  Purple prose is bad. Overly descriptive passages just for the sake of being overly descriptive is bad.  It’s overwriting and boring and slow.  I agree with White Raven.  The passages in the column were too much and pulled the reader out of the story.  In my nuttiness I, of course, commented which is likely to haunt me at some point, but ugh!

I managed to refrain from commenting *g*.  It was hard.

I hate purple prose with a passion, I always feel like getting the red pen out and re-writing it.

I love lush, lyrical prose when it’s well written, like ‘The God of Small Things.’ You can almost taste the words.
I hate purple prose, and it’s dreadfully easy to write. All it takes is a bit of bathos, a sprinkling of adverbs, and descriptions that make you think of clothes from the seventies in flashing, neon colors, and sweet, cloying perfume spilled over talcum powder.