A metaphor too many

On avoiding purple prose

I love the color purple except when it comes to prose. Then, I’m obsessed with it. I can wax poetic about grass.

Seriously.

Here’s an actual sentence from a story I once wrote: “The horses canter through oatgrass stalks, trample on fiddlenecks, and send swells of golden sunlight through a petulant army of fern.”

A friend I sent this story to (because one of the characters was based on him) responded with deep confusion, because he couldn’t see what part of the story was about him. Was he one of the horses? It was because he’d stopped reading after the first page, and the characters don’t even really show up until the third. 

The books I read growing up had the luxury of spending their opening paragraphs on landscape and weather. Most authors today, especially debut authors, do not. Even in science-fiction stories, where the world-building matters deeply, character must take precedence. Humans, not horses. We seem to be all we’re interested in.

It’s not always true. Every rule has an exception that proves it. The prologue of Jane Harper’s The Lost Man breaks two rules at once. First, it has a prologue, that thing that agents and publishers speak of as if it were the snot you ought to have cleaned off before you showed your manuscript to them. Second, the prologue is about dust. The vastness of dust, the marks in it, the color and extent. It’s also utterly brilliant.

Still, I’m trying to pare down the purple, to let the story shine through. Ultimately, what matters is keeping the reader turning the page, and nothing slows the reader down as much as convoluted prose. Something to remember the next time I get over-excited and write a sentence like, “Yeshe’s rage was like a fire, an explosion, something that burned until it exhausted itself, a force of nature.” 

That’s… probably a metaphor too many.

Above: I don’t even remember where I was when I took this photo or what was happening, but I just remember being excited by the purple.