No, that's not it. (You sillies.)
Purple prose is a term I've just recently become familiar with, and I'm glad I've learned what it means. Why? Because I see so much of it in amateur fiction, and it drives me absolutely crazy. In a bad way.
While basic prose follows natural grammatical structure and flow in a manuscript, purple prose refers to an overdose of sentence embellishment within. And underneath all the fanciful, laced-and-gilded strings of words reeks a highly unpleasant odor. The odor of self-indulgence, and the mudding of clear meaning.
I'm going to try to give a "purple" example by offering myself as a sacrifice to the ornamented, flowery altar that is this proceeding paragraph. Here goes nothing...
She lept, her prom dress billowing along the rainbow spectrum, into his robust iron arms, shaken by the luscious quivering muscles protruding hard from under his bronze skin coat. Her shaking was by no means a breathing mural of fear, but instead of a festering untold love, screaming and squirming in infanthood, relentlessly seeking to find release from her fragile porcelain baby-smooth frame of a body. As he jettisoned his warm, ruby-tinted lips upon her streaming topaz locks that picked up in love-induced turbulence, a weak coo of erotic desperation dispersed from her vocal chords and aroused his primal testosterone-gorged spirit.
...
Bleeeeeergh!
I'm sorry about that; really I am.
In short, writers should not be writing prose in this fashion - using too many metaphorical adjectives or whatnot - if they are to be taken seriously. If they're doing it to be funny, well, it still gets cumbersome to read after a while (to say the least). Some people enjoy it, and might argue that it strengthens the prose by fueling our imaginations on previously unimagined levels. However, I would make a counterargument: such saturated descriptions are ultimately superfluous, giving nothing of real value to the piece (flash as a replacement for substance). It should be the writer's job to let the readers fill in the imaginative gaps, not confine them within the boundaries of the writer's, to put it coldly, "descriptive dictatorship." For the writer needs to trust the readers to picture everything that's taking place - nudging them in the right direction about what to visualize, but allowing for some leeway all the same.
That said, I believe the key to crafting entertaining prose is to find a good balance between adornment and practicality. Maintaining a streamlined narrative (for story) while delivering on enough vivid description to keep things from getting stale.
...Do I now feel like revising the garbage I wrote above regarding the two lovebirds? Not necessarily; no more naughty content from me.
I'm going to try to give a "purple" example by offering myself as a sacrifice to the ornamented, flowery altar that is this proceeding paragraph. Here goes nothing...
She lept, her prom dress billowing along the rainbow spectrum, into his robust iron arms, shaken by the luscious quivering muscles protruding hard from under his bronze skin coat. Her shaking was by no means a breathing mural of fear, but instead of a festering untold love, screaming and squirming in infanthood, relentlessly seeking to find release from her fragile porcelain baby-smooth frame of a body. As he jettisoned his warm, ruby-tinted lips upon her streaming topaz locks that picked up in love-induced turbulence, a weak coo of erotic desperation dispersed from her vocal chords and aroused his primal testosterone-gorged spirit.
...
Bleeeeeergh!
I'm sorry about that; really I am.
In short, writers should not be writing prose in this fashion - using too many metaphorical adjectives or whatnot - if they are to be taken seriously. If they're doing it to be funny, well, it still gets cumbersome to read after a while (to say the least). Some people enjoy it, and might argue that it strengthens the prose by fueling our imaginations on previously unimagined levels. However, I would make a counterargument: such saturated descriptions are ultimately superfluous, giving nothing of real value to the piece (flash as a replacement for substance). It should be the writer's job to let the readers fill in the imaginative gaps, not confine them within the boundaries of the writer's, to put it coldly, "descriptive dictatorship." For the writer needs to trust the readers to picture everything that's taking place - nudging them in the right direction about what to visualize, but allowing for some leeway all the same.
That said, I believe the key to crafting entertaining prose is to find a good balance between adornment and practicality. Maintaining a streamlined narrative (for story) while delivering on enough vivid description to keep things from getting stale.
...Do I now feel like revising the garbage I wrote above regarding the two lovebirds? Not necessarily; no more naughty content from me.
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