What on Earth is Purple Prose?
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As a writer, you’ve likely come across the term ‘purple prose’ on more than one occasion – usually delivered with a sneer or some inflection that marks the phrase as an unmistakeable pejorative.

But if you’re something of a novice in the world of writing and publishing, you might be asking yourself each time: just what is purple prose? And why is it purple?

The answer to the latter question isn’t quite as fun as “poetry written by Barney the dinosaur,” but it’s at least rather fitting in its original meaning. The reference to purple comes from Ars Poetica by Roman poet Horace, in which he wrote:

Weighty openings and grand declarations often
Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam
Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar,
The winding stream hastening through lovely fields,
Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described.
There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how
To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given
Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck
In despair?”

Horace’s choice of purple supposedly owes to its symbolic nature (at the time) as an indicator of wealth and status. Those bearing a garish purple robe or cloak, for example, would stand out in a crowd – displaying their eminence and elegance for all to see. With this in mind, Horace ties the color quite directly to something else: pretentiousness.

Regarding writing, purple prose is that which is needlessly long-winded, over-descriptive, and often obtuse for the reader owing to the author’s desire to sound as extravagantly verbose as possible. In most cases, these overblown passages rarely lead anywhere – they don’t take the story forward, nor focus on anything important. Instead, they take a leap from the ride and stand still, studiously inspecting the petals of a flower at the side of the road for no reason.

The idea of the ‘purple patch’ isn’t restricted solely to literature, though. Horace attributes it to many types of art – such as needless detail or flair added to pieces of an otherwise simple painting, solely to appease the artist. See the point Horace raises in the excerpt shown earlier, where he poses the question of what use it is to meticulously draw a cypress tree when the focus of the work asks only for an image of a sailor falling from a wreck.

In other words, it’s pointless and unnecessary. That’s purple.

But of course, as an author, you’re in the business of description. After all, what are you doing if not describing stories for your readers? Settings and scenes don’t bring themselves to life on the page – it’s up to you to do that, and you have many tools at your disposal to make it happen.

So how do you know when your writing is hitting the mark – keeping the ride moving while offering the reader plenty of sights to see – and when you’re turning purple, stopping to stare at time-wasting redundancies?

The answer isn’t always clear (the enjoyment of art will always remain subjective), but here are a few tips to help you along the way…



Be careful with metaphors, similes, and other figurative language
In most cases, there’s simply no need to get figurative – a well-employed standard verb or adjective can paint the picture you’re after far more quickly, and much more clearly, than an overblown metaphor.

Part of the fun of writing (and reading), though, is in discovering impressive, emotive turns of phrase, so this isn’t to say that you should avoid them entirely. Just be careful with how often, and how fittingly, you employ figurative language – it’s often a marker of amateur writing to see metaphor after metaphor and simile after simile piled one on top of another in succession, and it makes for some extremely unattractive prose...

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