What is Purple Prose?

And how do you overcome "purpureus pannus"?

Dear Friends,

In the first semester of my doctoral studies, I was required to take a class on critical theory. We started historically with classical foundations, spending our first discussion talking about Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace. It’s the latter who wrote Ars Poetica, perhaps one of the earliest known love letters dedicated to dishing out writing advice. Horace focuses on what makes for quality poetry and drama. Translated from the original Latin, I remember sitting with my highlighter and running through this excerpt:

If a painter had chosen to set a human head
On a horse’s neck, covered a melding of limbs,
Everywhere, with multi-coloured plumage, so
That what was a lovely woman, at the top,
Ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish:
Asked to a viewing, could you stifle laughter, my friends?
Believe me, a book would be like such a picture,
Dear Pisos, if it’s idle fancies were so conceived
That neither its head nor foot could be related
To a unified form. ‘But painters and poets
Have always shared the right to dare anything.’
I know it: I claim that licence, and grant it in turn:
But not so the wild and tame should ever mate,
Or snakes couple with birds, or lambs with tigers.
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? It started out as a wine-jar: then why,
As the wheel turns round does it end up a pitcher?
In short let it be what you wish, but whole and natural.

When I came across the bit about the purple patches being tacked on a thought crossed my mind: wait, is he talking about “purple prose”? I had never read Horace before, let alone any classical thinkers, and it had never occurred to me that such a phrase could be over two thousand years old. It turns out that not only did Horace coin the concept of purple prose (“purpureus pannus”), but he’s also the first-known writer to use the phrase “in media res.”

So what exactly was Horace talking about? “Pannus” is a Latin word for “cloth,” so the above quote is meant to scold poets who break the unity of a poem by stitching in an eye‑catching but ill‑fitting ornamental passage of “purple cloth.” Thus, the “purpureus pannus” in question is operating as a textile metaphor. Purple cloth (dyed with Tyrian purple) was expensive in antiquity. A small scrap sewn onto an ordinary garment would instantly draw the eye and proclaim luxury—but also advertise that it was only a patch, not integral to the fabric. Horace’s deeper belief was connected to the decorum and unity of a piece of writing. He was saying that every part of a poem must suit the poem’s overall purpose, tone, and narrative moment. A beautiful digression that calls attention to itself—no matter how skillfully written—violates that principle.

Two thousand years later, the core of Horace’s definition still holds true to how we discuss purple prose. While (personally speaking), I’ve heard the phrase a lot less in the past decade-and-a-half, I do remember encountering it quite often in creative writing classrooms in the aughts. I recently heard the phrase used a couple of times in the past week, and I started meditating on it again. I suppose my current preoccupation came from wanting to tease out some discernment between purple prose and other types of poetic prose—or prose of excess. In contemporary creative writing discourse, usually “purple prose” is defined as writing that is overly flowery, ornamental, baroque, overwrought, pretentious, dense, elaborate, exaggerated, unnecessary…. The reason I don’t love this definition though is because there is good writing that does all of these things. “Purple prose” is a pejorative, communicating some failure of craft. There is, however, nothing inherently wrong with writing that is baroque, overwrought, elaborate, and so on.

What I’d like to do is take a moment to try and tease out the difference between purple and other types of floral/musical/ornamental prose¹ and also try to locate some pitfalls of where one’s prose might venture off into the lands of lavender, lilac, periwinkle, plum, and violet.

Tyrian purple came from Murex, a predatory snail with a secretion that was used for the dye.

Beginner Writers Taking Risks & Learning Occasion

I’ve noticed “purple prose” tends to be lobbed at creative writers who are relatively new to their practice. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this specific newsletter because this phrase has been aimed at your own writing, worry not. We’ve all been there. I’d argue that “purple prose” can be an exciting turn for some writers because it means they’re experimenting with voice and style in a way that might be new territory for them. It might be the case that the voice you’re trying on isn’t fully working yet, but consider this: readers in your workshop are noticing, which means are you are doing something that is challenging your readers.

With prose-writing, I’ve noticed the phrase “invisible writing” has increasingly come into vogue—a term that we could, theoretically, place opposite to “purple” on a spectrum of prose visibility. This phrase is associated with prose that does not call attention to itself. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that’s a place many writers begin. This type of prose is generally associated with fiction with commercial appeal. While I’d argue it’s a neutral phrase, it can have positive or negative connotations depending on who is talking about it. The “invisibility” often goes hand-in-hand with plot. The argument for invisible prose is that good prose is meant to carry the plot onward. It’s invisible because the reader does not want to think about how they’re reading words while holding a book in their hands. The argument is that writing that calls attention to itself is going to snatch the reader out of this illusion of being transported to a fictional universe, which is a no-no for writing that prizes immersion. I should note these arguments generally originate in writing circles that are concerning themselves with traditional publishing. They’re also not arguments I personally agree with—especially in regards to the assumption that plot must be the core of all fiction.

Yes, I do think it’s true that commercial writing being published (and some genre fiction) tends to lean towards invisibility, and I do think one could argue that literary fiction has more permission to lean towards visibility. There are plenty of books which defy this binary though. It is also important, as one develops their own sense of writing, to know what vehicles are carrying a specific piece of writing forward. That, in my opinion, makes for a better line of questioning than obsessions over pigeon-holing writing into a particular genre—or running purity tests for genre expectations. The questions we should be asking include: is this a story where plot is central? Is this a novel about character? Am I more focused on theme? Or do I have more category-defying experiments at play? The answers will often lead you to places about what you could do with language to support the most important aspects of your writing. Publishing of course complicates everything. Writing is just writing, meaning that there are no limits. Writing that aims towards publishing often must consider markets and trends, which could result in editing language in a certain direction (and more likely an invisible one).

That being said, there are no hard-and-fast rules, even where publishing is concerned. This is How You Lose the Time War, for example, is a work of science fiction with flavors of espionage, but it is also an epistolary novel with extremely showy passages that call attention to themselves. It was also a novel that went viral and has a huge readership, which is a testament to how writing that asks the reader to put in work can be commercially successful. What I’d say about This is How You Lose the Time War (which I already wrote about in detail here) is that as the novel goes on, the two main characters are falling in love with each other. The showboating via the letter-writing process becomes part of the courting ritual. The excess is part of the declarations of love, of two characters who are learning to abandon the perfection and self-control that comes with identifying as a spy or secret agent.

As far as bias goes, I’m certainly someone who favors risks and experiments in the direction of excessive visibility—even if they result in failure. I’d contend that there is no default: invisibility needs its justification just as much as visibility does. I’d also argue, inversely, that if you do it the right way—and pull it off—no justification is even needed. Chocking something up to an author’s style may be enough. For writers who are just beginning to think about why they’ve made the decisions they’ve made, I’d push you in the direction of thinking about what is at the heart of each individual piece of writing and if there are occasions that call for a certain styling of prose over another. People are less likely to accuse your prose of being “purple” if the writing itself matches a certain occasion or context.

One other thought I’d like to add is that I do think there can be some bullying toward invisibility because readers don’t want to put the work in. We should all be careful of ideology that presents itself as some sort of neutral “good writing tip.” It also seems a bit unfair to me to call something “purple” just because a reader didn’t want to, well, read. That being said, there is a balance. Don’t write towards impenetrability unless that is a very purposeful choice for your writing. At the same time, be skeptical of someone who is trying to edit your own writing toward the lowest common denominator.

If you are new to this though, I’d also just say: go for it. Flop onto that patch of snail-mucus-dyed cloth. You’re never going to learn if you don’t practice, and you’re never going to learn how to control the degrees of ornamentation inside your prose if you don’t experiment with hyper-visible prose to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.

Prose Writers Who Don’t Read [Contemporary] Poetry

If I have one axe to grind, this is it. When defining “purple prose,” one of my own definitions would be “prose writers who want to write poetically, but don’t actually read poetry.” I would also expand this definition to include “writers who don’t listen to the rhythm and meter of the sentence,” but that feels similar, as it’s also the result of writers who haven’t developed their poetic muscles enough to flex them. While the above section about risk-taking was focused on writers who are newer to their own creative writing practices, there are prose writers of all levels who don’t read poetry—but want to lean into some sort of poetic register while writing. To put it simply, my argument is that if you have developed the muscles to write poetic prose, your sentences will almost always avoid purpleness.

While I tend to try to avoid ever making statements that focus on concepts like natural talent, I do think there are people who naturally have ears attuned to rhyme and meter—just in the way that there are dancers who hold a natural rhythm in their bodies. When I was a child, I played piano for about four or five years. My piano teacher used to gently chastise me and make statements along the lines of, “You have an ear for music. You can hear the wrong notes you make on the piano when playing for me. It’s a shame you don’t practice enough to avoid hitting the wrong notes in the first place.” She was correct—at least about the part of how much I hated practicing piano and came to every lesson under-prepared. But practicing is how you help develop your ear for music, even if you don’t have one “naturally.” And if you don’t develop that ear, you’re going to have a less-developed sense for detecting if that sentence you just wrote is hitting the “wrong note” (i.e., the purple note) or not.

And, sure, you might be able to circumvent some of this by reading prose writers who have a mastery of poetry and read a good deal of poetry themselves. I’d still argue for reading poetry first-hand to develop a sense of lyrical writing for yourself. There are many different ways people talk about prose writers who have developed poetic muscles: the music of the sentence, the sonic quality of the sentence, the acoustics of a sentence. Much like the word “lyrical,” which comes from the lyre instrument, these terms are focusing on sound and musicality. The quickest way to develop a sense of rhythm, rhyme, meter, etc., is to read poetry to strengthen that muscle. This will also help you develop an understanding of literary devices such as assonance and consonance, which in turn translates to an understanding of emphasis and repetition (more on this in a minute).

One other trademark of purple prose I saw mentioned was this idea that writers pick up a thesaurus and choose the most over-complicated word to sound smart. While I don’t know how true that is, I will say that a poetic intuition, i.e., a basic understanding of the rhythmic structure of a line (or sentence) should clue you in to your own word choice as you write (or edit). Sometimes a sentence will be moving towards a complication that betrays the exact flow the sentence is begging for, and you ultimately choose X word over Y word because it has less syllables and keeps up a certain type of momentum or cadence. I suppose, in this instance, “overwriting” would mean willfully going against the grain of the natural, musical flow of language. Once again though, I emphasize that one might need to read certain types of writing to make this part of their own nature.

Something I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about is that while I feel not enough people read poetry—certainly not enough people read contemporary poetry. If you are writing something that is contemporary and exists in this “now,” why wouldn’t you want to read your peers to strengthen your own contemporary voice? Don’t get me wrong though. I don’t think it’s always easy. One adage that poets like to say is that only poets read poetry. The joke is that poetry is so insular that only those who write it also read it. While that is, of course, not true, I do think it can highlight how poetry has shifted into a place in our literary culture where it has a somewhat difficult entry point. Truth be told, I’ve been on a bit of an exodus from the poetry world for about five years, and I’m completely clueless to what poetry collections are making waves right now. I have a bit of homework to do if I’m to catch up, so I understand anyone who feels a sort of “outsider status” as far as poetry is concerned. Where to begin?

It’s hard for me to give a good place to start advice too, because it’s advice I have complicated feelings about. I used to recommend to my students to try to buy something from the monthly best-seller list on Small Press Distribution (SPD), but welp, that shut down last year. I do think looking at award winners and finalists can be an excellent place to start; I also feel that we should be skeptical of viewing the “award industrial complex” as somehow unbiased in its taste—or as a sign of some meritocratic superior quality. But I would also prefer people look for books via venerated awards like the Pulitzer, National Book Awards, Firecracker Awards, PEN/Voelcker, Tufts awards—as well as the numerous awards that come out of the Academy of American Poets—before looking at spaces like Amazon best-sellers or Goodreads Choice Awards.

I’d also encourage folks who are interested in reading more poetry to check out book reviews, particularly those from Publishers Weekly. While I’m not as much “in-the-loop” as I was when I reviewed poetry for PW (2016–2019), I can say it was incredibly diverse range of poetry collections, and their starred reviews would be another great place to start.

Finally, if you don’t want to commit to any one author’s collection, there are always poetry magazines like American Poetry Review and POETRY which you could subscribe to.

Overcomplication without Justification or Emphasis

One of the definitions of purple prose involves writing that is too elaborate or ornate or grandiose or effusive. I would prefer to think of this as writing that doesn't justify its ornamentation, doesn't emphasize it enough. Another way to frame this could also be a confidence issue: writers trying to lean into language they don’t normally use without fully standing behind their own words.

One of the arguments toward celebrating excess and embellishment is that creative writing operates on the art-making of language. Something that separates it from other media is that you get to live inside all the loveliness of language in a way that feels unique to writing as an art form. I’d wager why this is why some beginner writers are quick to grab at vermilion instead of red, cerulean instead of blue. These intricate exactitudes are alluring, sexy. Creative writing nearly demands that we lean into all of its possibilities with language, so why not?

Something that “purple writers” might not be considering though is how to create a consistent character or narrative voice. There’s nothing wrong with exsanguine or nectareous or verdant or crystalline or petrichor‑soaked or vermilion, but you can’t half-ass it. If you say it only once when no other part of your writing has been attuned to such language, it’s going to stand out. Accessing that type of register can’t just live in a single purple patch: it has to bleed all over the page. When I speak of “register,” I mean the variety of language a writer chooses to fit a specific situation, relationship, and/or purpose. It’s the palette of diction, syntax, and idioms. It’s field expertise, tenor, and mode. It’s the difference between a character speaking in a way that’s slangy, chatty, archaic, overly formal, technical, or jargon-heavy.

A simple trick I would encourage, when trying to full-ass your prose, is trying to lean into repetition to make a word choice seem purposeful, deliberate. I’ll give you an example, since colors are an easy go-to when talking about language that can move from the general (“blue”) to the eyecatchingly specific (“cerulean”). In fact, I’m going to talk about cerulean blue. One of my favorite episodes of The X-Files (as seen above) starts with a cold open of a man shopping in a grocery store. It’s clear that he’s being trailed by some sort of police team as he moves through the aisles—a fact that is not lost on him. After being pinned to the checkout conveyor belt by an FBI agent, we learn that the man is called “Pusher.”

In the next scene, Pusher is in the back of a police car at the tail end of a cavalcade. We quickly learn how he earned his nickname: he uses language to hypnotize and send subliminal messages. He uses language to push people to do what they would not normally do. He begins to deliver a monologue about the police officers’ uniforms being “the most soothing shade of blue.” He begins to suggest the police uniforms are cerulean, emphasizing that word, repeating it over and over. Through the power of suggestion, Pusher mentally blocks the officer (the one driving the car) from realizing a truck is heading toward them, and said truck slams into the police car, which ultimately allows Pusher to escape.

What I love about this scene is that “cerulean” has a purpose. The emphasis on the word exists to communicate to us so much about Pusher’s character: how he talks, how he manipulates, and how he possesses a paranormal ability to bend people to his will using the power of spoken language. I.e., “cerulean” becomes more than justified here: it’s a portal into how Pusher’s mind works.

When I first looked into “purple prose,” some of the advice I saw was trying to point people away from ornamentation or language they would not usually lean into, i.e.: put down that thesaurus! I want to encourage people in the other direction—the one toward the purple patches. But one most write toward this with self-awareness and expertise. It’s not just about crafting excessively multi-syllabic phrases or overly long sentences because you think that makes for some solid writerly affect—it’s about actually comprehending the meter of the sentence and understanding when a sentence calls for variety or specificity. That’s the not-knowing versus the knowing.

The purple risks are worth taking to become a writers who has stylistic versatility—but some time must be spent in the poetry mines first. One must read poetry to be able to write through it. One must understand the occasion(s) for using different registers of language in any given storyworld. One most lean toward emphasis and repetition—using overwrought language in confidence. This is what separates writing that seems to use ornamentation as a mistake or artifice with writing that does so with tenacity and determination.

Until next time,
JD

1. Technically the “prose” could also apply to nonfiction writing or any other type of prose-based writing, but I will focus more on fiction-writing here.