Writers: Tools of the Trade

Purple and Beige

Descriptions: When is enough and when should you stop? These are the questions all writers must face. There are two extremes a writer can take; purple prose or beige prose. 

Purple Prose:

Purple prose occurs when the writing, while possessing a sturdy and coherent plot and/or round, rich characterization, is dry and uninteresting to read. In response, the writer will "puff", if you will, their prose with much more elaborate and fancy words, eschewing quotidian sentences for elaborate concatenation of phrases and clauses. On occasion, such racks of ornament can be despicable, with the scintillating adjectives bewildering the reader and obscuring the subject.

If you turn to page 27 of Brisingr by Christopher Paolini, you will find a text book example of this

Narration: The branch Roran had added to the fire burst asunder with a muted pop as the coals underneath heated the gnarled length of wood to the point where a small cache of water or sap that had somehow evaded the rays of the sun for untold decades exploded into steam.

What just happened: a twig in the fire popped. 

Also in Brisingr: "She flew nonstop until the sun had traversed the dome of the sky and extinguished itself behind the horizon and then burst forth again with a glorious conflagration of reds and yellows."

What happened: Saphira flew for a day and a night.

There are many other incidences of this happening in other books, but since I have Brisingr out on my desk right now, that's where the examples are coming from. Pride and Prejudice has a lot of Purple prose as well.

Purple prose is not bad; it is a style of writing. 

Beige Prose:

Brief descriptions. Simple sentence structure. Plain words. Few figures of speech. Sometimes intentional.

Witty when effective. Otherwise, dull. Use carefully.

Hemingway is FAMOUS for his beige prose. Other books with this style include but are not limited to The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Virals. 

Not always bad. It's a style of writing.

So when you're writing, which do you do? I find the best style is a mix of the two, descriptions that paint a mental picture of the world but doesn't slow the story. See, that's the key about descriptions:

Don't stop the flow of the story.

You don't want them to go on too long. This is the Law of Conservation of Detail in effect, that when you show something, maybe it will be important later. 

The best way to get better at descriptions is by writing. A lot. Like everything writing is a skill, and the best way to improve a skill is by practicing. When I started out, I was lousy at descriptions. Now that I've been writing for a long while, I find that I'm much better.

But you know what? Don't take my word for it. Back to lesson 1: Show, don't tell.

This is an excerpt from my very first story, tilted Aquazul. I honestly have forgotten just how bad I used to write, I'm going to keep this short so I don't have to cringe as much.

"[Sarah]'s room is very plain, just a bed and a window. I never bothered to decorate it. I walked over and looked out my window. I was in Basilo, a small island where I go to school. The school part was on the other side of the island. The island of Sable was a few miles off shore. Sable is a medium sized island, with the Flavian Mountains on one side and the city on the other."

*cringe* I forgot how awful my writing used to be...I'm not talking about the paragraph I used; it took me awhile to find something useable for this. Maybe I'll bring up some new stuff for this using that as examples for what NOT to do. 

Anyways, the problems with that paragraph are that the descriptions run together. "Island" appears everywhere, and it makes the description muddled. I can't tell you if the islands had forests or what the "city" looks like or why they're on an island in the first place. All I know is that there are mountains on the island. 

Writing Time!

Find three pictures, either online or in a scrapbook, and write a paragraph describing them. Don't worry about plot or characters or anything, just the scene.