Archived Editorial for 07/02/06

Picking On Purple Prose
by Rebecca Brown

This phrase transformed down the ages from something the Roman poet Horace (Qunintus Horatius Flaccus) wrote, in Latin of course, in his Ars Poetica (lines 14-21) about how: “Your opening shows great promise, but has flashy purple patches; as when describing a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana, or a stream meandering through fields, or the river Rhine, or a rainbow. But these are out of place; if you can realistically render a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?”

Purple dye, a rarity in the Ancient World, was only for the richest folk. That's why the color purple came to be associated with royalty. During Horace's time, social climbers would sew purple borders on to their cheaper clothes to give the appearance of wealth. Horace was alluding to this practice when he commented that elaborate language was like those ‘purple patches’... ostentatious & inappropriate.

The intent of this particular brand of writing is to manipulate readers' emotions by using lurid language: originally pale yellow, ghastly, deathly pale, wan. Mostly known today as vivid or harsh language intending to shock, startle, be sensational. It's often characterized by out of control passion(or action), redundancy & cliches, rather than using original words & phrases. It does have its place in the vast torrent of published works, however, when writers get hooked on such language, their stories read like what they are... pulp fiction... not literature.

Here's a trivia question: Who originally wrote the now infamous opening line: “It was a dark and stormy night...”?

Sophisticated editors & reviewers use the purple prose criticism to alert authors & readers about certain passages, even whole books, that are dense with exaggerated sentiment, coated with lashings of pathos & loaded with worn out cliches. Why? Because all it does is draw attention to itself & smothers what could have been a jolly good story.

I get super miffed when media releases promise a good & literary read until the book arrives, & by the end of the first page I'm drowning in a flood of adjectives, gagging on all the adverbs, with logs of repetitions cracking my cerebral shins, stumbling over redundant stage directions & banging into inept asides. A mind is a hardy thing, however, it can take just so much abuse!

After encountering a tome of purple prose I'm likely to turn to a technical book because there's no passion & drama there. You expect & get nice language. By the way, did you know the word “nice” started out in naval language? It meant precise, neat & tidy... which is, of course, very nice, as opposed to purple prose, which isn't.

After years of reading & reviewing & editing, I've put together these tips for the novice & hopeful writer:
•  see the scene & keep it lean.
•  where you can use only 20 words to describe something... do so, however, make them the best words you know, which need not be $10 ones, just rich in imagery.
•  where you've got 25-300 words to describe something... cut, & then cut some more! Contrary to popular belief, your readers do have imaginations & their minds will happily fill in the blanks, as long as you give them the outline in the first place. When you clobber them with interminable minutiae of how something happened, they're likely to give it the toss, growling, “& I spent good money for this? Where's the story?”

Learn to use your computer's programs to:
•  check your spelling -- don't forget your characters' names & all the place names... there's little more irritating than finding the hero's name spelt differently, ditto places
•  check your wrong words. Mrs. Malaprop is one of my heroines, however, I KNOW the words she gets muddled, do you?
•  check the repetitions of words & pet phrases -- I write my drafts in NoteTab Pro & it has a dandy little tool called Text Statistics. In an 80K word tale, the odd repetition is no big thing, however, when a writer gets hung up on a word or a phrase & repeats them in the same sentence, paragraph & chapter, again & again yet... this editor has already lobbed the offending tome into the “out box”.

Telling your story:
•  if you're writing a mystery or thriller don't give the story away. What makes a mystery good is when the author lets the reader catch the clues & ask the questions. & please, I beg of you, don't have your hero/ine explain or list 'em, in every other chapter.
•  learn about “qualifiers”: they are the dreariest & laziest of writing. What do I mean by a “qualifier”? -- “He appeared to be...” -- “She seemed to be...” -- “for some strange reason my...” -- “I managed to/tried to...” -- “I groaned inwardly...” -- “She said self–consciously...”, & the like.
•  learn what it takes to turn your DRAFT = that very first writing to THE END, into a polished MANUSCRIPT ready for your reading group.

Plausibility
You can stretch your readers' credulity only so far, even subconsciously, before they quit in disbelief, & 9/11 has changed everything. Remember too, when you're writing about another era, be alert for anachronisms - a wrong time
1. the representation of something as existing or occurring at other than its proper time, especially earlier
2. anything that is or seems to be out of its proper time in history which, for anyone with an eye for timelines, will raise red flags of incongruity.

Timeline
Plot out not only the timeline of your story, create a history, & a future. You may not use most of it, however, it will give you the solid ground upon which to create your story so that your readers won't stumble into muddled-up times. For example, say an event happened on Tuesday morning & your hero has less than 48 hours to find the answer. All of a sudden it's Saturday morning... or yesterday was Sunday. Say the opening scene is in September, “weeks” pass & it's Thanksgiving. Chapters later you have people graduating in January & talking about going home for the holidays.
•  see where you've set your timeline in granite & that will be what sets the frames of references, vernacular, clothes, music, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Watch movies, listen to the hits, read the bestsellers -- all from that time. & if you can, go there & find out what they did, heard, saw, smelt.

About your characters
Open a new folder with a set of files in which you write the life & times for all major characters. Their likes & dislikes, body odors & allergies, statistics & distinguishing marks, clothes & eating habits, how they sleep, walk, talk -- their pet expletives & personal philosophies -- of each & every character -- everything you can think of to make them visible, tangible, real. You may not use half of it, however, everyone in your story will come alive to you, & by extension to your readers.

POV—point of view:
While first (1st) person narratives allow gaps in recounting the story, they must have segments for filling in, because readers can rapidly lose all sense of time & place. So it's vital, in each chapter, to anchor the time & location
•   every chapter has to start with a bang & then back up, however, watch out for the loss of momentum to the overall story because it's really easy for the back–ups to get sidetracked
•   beware of editorial summations, asides & intimations that will dilute the action, suspense & surprise
•   because all 1st person stories tend to go passive, beware that your hero/ine doesn't come off as dull–witted, easily rattled, naive. This can be offset with changes in verb tenses, & having things done directly, with no qualifiers -- “appeared to/seemed to/tried to” nor exaggerated verbiage
     The greatest drawback to 1st person narrative is the author's propensity to make the hero all–knowing, more clever than everyone else & wise beyond his experience (or the exact opposite: know-nothing, mean-minded & hapless), while paying little attention to his behavior, choices of words & actions, which almost always come off as predictable, immature, inept & cliched
     There's also another problem which can leave a bad taste in your readers' minds -- when your hero is constantly critical, caustic & dismissive.
     The greatest drawback to third person narrative is the author's propensity to include what everyone is thinking & doing, within the same paragraph yet! This is what I call leapfrog writing. We're merrily reading along on one character's adventures & reactions when, BAM!, in the very next sentence, we've leapfrogged into someone else's mind & POV. & this goes on throughout the tale, hopping from character to character until...

Passive & Active voices:
the difference is whether your words lie flat on the page or leap up & grab your readers' attention, so, put the focus & impact on the how of the who, what, when, where & why of it:
•   Passive: done to: I was seen by the eye doctor. I found my hand reaching for... The door Terry went through was the one to the...
•   Active: done by: The optometrist checked my eyes. I grabbed for the... Terry tore open the door to the...

Dialogue
Dialogue is not, per se, a transcription of conversations. Its purpose is to transmit information to the reader about the people speaking, feelings, events. Keep it lean, avoid normal empty repartee & echo talk, such as:
     “Just like this one?” John said.
     “Just like this one,” I repeated.
     “Are you still there?”
     “Yes, I am still here.”
•   use verb contractions, especially when someone's angry, excited, triumphant
•   avoid italics & use exclamation points rarely. Your choice of words will indicate the emphasis
•   3 dots... indicate trailing off = “I was wondering if...”
•   a long dash indicates interruption = “Wasn't that Jeremy I-”
•   read your dialgoues out loud, even record them to listen to their impact, what information they're imparting, & where you have to prune the excess. Would they really say it that way? People often drop words while talking, especially when excited:
     “Just like this one?” he said.
     “Yup.” (“Exactly.” or “Huh–huh.”)
     “Are you still there?”
     “Yeah, I'm here.”
•   avoid repetitious stage directions, once the scene it set, insert only when something changes
•   avoid turning your conversationalists into highbrow English professors lecturing your readers in the guise of catch-up... unless they are; also spouting lengthy, “cut & pasted” travelogues about the architecture of a place, its history or geology they wouldn't normally know about (especially if they haven't been there before)... unless they've read a brochure about it, or such subjects are a hobby of theirs
•   it's customary to put a comma with a name = “Yeah, Emily.” or “Allen, why don't you...”
Keep your dialogues lean & colloquial

When you open a door, remember to close it
•  if you describe other people's clothes, you need to say, occasionally, what your heroine's wearing -- it doesn't have to be a catalogue of brand names, unless you're writing chic chick lit
•  if your hero has a weapon in one chapter, make sure he still has it later & remember, if you want a gun toting hero you'd better know about your state & country's laws about Concealed Weapons Permits. If you want him to be believable -- as in a police officer or federal agent, you need to know how gun people refer to their weapons & that your hero knows how it works, & if you want him to be a sharp shooter, he needs time in his life to practise on a range (indoor or outside). He also needs to know how carry & clean it, that is if you want to be a believable & responsible author...
conversely...
•  beware of opening a door that hasn't previously existed, as in “the hot tub in the middle of the garden” which wasn't there the first time you described the garden, or a character pops up in chapter 5 & after you've lavished much attention on him/her, he/she's never heard of again

Counting your words:
In publishing it's all about the number of words: your proposal, synopsis, outline, query letter, draft, manuscript... everything. Referring to the number of pages of your project is of no use because you won't know your publishers' print sizing. Editors estimate their fees by the number of words. Every word processing program has a word counter, & you need to have that number, rounded out to the nearest hundred, on your cover page, along with your book's genre/s, so...

Spend your words wisely & self–edit by asking, at the end of each day's writing:
•  How does this move the story along?
•  How credible is this?
•  Have I done my homework/research?
•  SEE THE SCENE & KEEP IT LEAN

“It was a dark and stormy night...” appeared in British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford. 1982, San Jose State University in California began an annual contest for the worst opening line to a novel.

Other editorials about writing:
Writing Your Memoirs Part I
Writing Your Memoirs Part II
Less is More or How to Write Clean & Lean
The Ten Worst Things First Time Writers Do - Part 1
The Ten Worst Things First Time Writers Do - Part 2
Wannabe Writer Asks Questions
The Shunned Book Synopsis

P.S. After reading my editorials, reviews & thoughts all these years, have you discovered the one word, that people use as liberally as salt in cooking, which I avoid with every usable cerebral synapsis? If you're interested in why, ask me.

Your fierce & fond editor Rebecca

Rebecca