In my opinion, descriptive, but not purple. She had the face to carry it off, too, clean and striking, marvelous, with a full jaw and dramatic brows, and enough height and carriage to pass for a youth of sixteen. The soft, husky voice that didn’t rise and fall in ordinary tones, but stayed stubbornly gruff that skin, those lips, the slender build-oh, she was a female, the sly little cat. first realizes that Leigh, the heroine, is actually a woman dressed as a boy: Take, for instance, this passage from the beginning of Laura Kinsale’s The Prince of Midnight. The old maxim to make every word count holds no meaning to them, neither does the concept that over-described objects can interfere every bit as much with a reader’s visualization as under-described objects. And I won’t even tell you what I think when I read words like “slick love grotto” or “passion-bedewed portal,” though the phrase “gag me” does feature prominently in these thoughts.Ĥ. The phrase “alabaster mounds,” when used to describe breasts, often makes me think of large lumps of cold, dead marble probably not the effect the author wanted to achieve. When the prose isn’t mundane, it’s jarring. The wind is “cruel and biting,” bare branches are “gnarled, grasping fingers,” the eyes are “sparkling orbs,” old women are “withered crones,” words are not spoken, they’re “rasped passionately.” Nothing new is offered you’re drowned in a sea of descriptions that have been used so often, they’re well-nigh meaningless.ģ. The descriptions, while elaborate, are almost always quite painfully mundane. She can’t leave the naked, quivering, defenceless word alone she must assault it with modifiers, gleefully thrust in multiple adjectives and adverbs, and violate it merrily with superlatives and bad metaphors-not unlike what I’m doing to this paragraph now.Ģ. She is a habitual noun- and verb-molester. To me, prose becomes purple instead of merely descriptive or lyrical when the author does any of the following:ġ. It wasn’t originally, but hey, gone are also the days when “gay” was used primarily to mean “lighthearted and happy,” and “anti-semitic” means “hatred of Jews” even though many, many Jews aren’t semitic and many semitic peoples aren’t Jewish and are, in fact, anti-semitic themselves. And for those of you who read my comment in Romancing the Blog, I distinguish between lyrical writing and purple prose, which is a pejorative term. I have to thank Rebecca Brandewyne for writing the column on purple prose today because I had nothing to talk about I was planning on quietly working on a few things like, ohhhh, actual WORK, but now I have something more fun to play with.
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