Purple Prose Isn’t Pretty, It’s Distracting

One of my very first beta reading jobs taught me a lesson I will never, ever forget. I was new to the gig, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to help a writer with their work. The author had four chapters ready and wanted my most honest, no-holds-barred feedback. I was happy to oblige.

I poured a cup of coffee, opened the document, and began to read. But something was wrong. I wasn’t being drawn into a world or getting to know a character. I wasn’t following a plot. Instead, every single sentence was grabbing me by the collar and screaming, “Look at me! Look how literary I am!”

Every line was soaked in purple prose. One of the first lines described the wind as sounding “like an asthmatic walrus.”

I stopped. I reread it. An… asthmatic… walrus.

My writerly brain short-circuited with questions. First of all, can walruses even get asthma? Is that a thing? Second, even if they could, who on God’s green earth would know what that sounds like? The comparison, meant to create a vivid image, did the exact opposite. It yanked me out of the story and forced me to puzzle over a bizarre, unrelatable, and frankly comical mental picture. Want to be as confused as me? Here is that paragraph:

“The blizzard bellowed like an asthmatic walrus as I marched through snow that reached my gown’s bustle. “Greetings listeners, this is your intrepid host, Professor Webb, descended from the venerable Headmaster Webb, recording live , so to speak, from the farthest reaches of the blank page on the map I have yet to name. And don’t get jealous, but at age ten my dimples rivaled that of the babe Jesus himself.”.”

Here’s the hard truth that this experience burned into my brain: If your prose confuses the reader, you have already lost them. Prose is not a performance. It is a window. If the glass is so ornate and colored that the reader can’t see the world on the other side, then the window has failed at its only job. Purple prose isn’t pretty. It’s a dirty window.

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What Is Purple Prose, Really?

The asthmatic walrus” is an extreme example, but purple prose comes in many forms. It’s not just about one bad simile. It’s a whole mindset that prioritizes sounding “writerly” over being clear. It’s born from insecurity and a deep-seated fear of being boring. Most writers have been guilty of it at some point. The key is to learn to spot it in your own work and have the courage to kill it. 

Here are the primary characteristics of purple prose:

1. Adjective and Adverb Overload
   This is the most common symptom. The writer doesn’t trust their nouns and verbs, so they smother them with modifiers in a desperate attempt to add flavor.
   • ♦ Purple: The tall, imposing man walked slowly and sadly down the long, dark, lonely road.
   • ♦ Clear: The giant trudged down the empty road.
   See the difference? “Giant” is a stronger noun than “tall, imposing man.” “Trudged” is a stronger verb than “walked slowly and sadly.” The clear version is shorter, sharper, and creates a more powerful image without the clutter.
2. Overstuffed and Obscure Metaphors
   This is the walrus problem. A metaphor or simile is supposed to make things clearer by connecting the unfamiliar to the familiar. Purple prose does the reverse, connecting something simple (the wind) to something impossibly obscure (a sick marine mammal). The goal is to illuminate, not to show off how many weird facts you know. If your comparison requires a Google search, it has failed.
3. The Thesaurus Dump
   This writer has their thesaurus open at all times. They believe that using a bigger, more obscure word is always better. They don’t write “beautiful”; they write “pulchritudinous.” They don’t say a character was “sad”; they say he was “lugubrious.” This doesn’t make you sound smart. It makes you sound like you’re trying to sound smart, which is the opposite of intelligence. It creates a stilted, unnatural rhythm that alienates the reader.
4. Long, Convoluted Sentences
   The writer tries to cram five different ideas into a single sentence, using a labyrinth of semicolons and subordinate clauses, until the reader has forgotten how the sentence even started. While long sentences can be beautiful when constructed with care (think Virginia Woolf or Jorge Luis Borges), in the hands of a purple prose writer, they become exhausting, unreadable messes. Good writing uses varied sentence structure, short, punchy sentences for impact, and longer, well-crafted sentences for flow. Purple prose is all flow and no impact.

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The Root of the Problem: Why Writers Drown in Purple

Writers don’t use purple prose because they are bad writers. They use it because they are insecure writers. They fall into this trap for a few key reasons:

• Fear of Being Boring: They worry their plot, characters, or ideas aren’t interesting enough on their own, so they try to dress them up in fancy language, hoping the glitter will distract from the lack of substance. The irony is that clear, confident storytelling is never boring.
• Misunderstanding “Literary” Writing: They equate “good writing” with “complicated writing.” They read a classic author who used complex language for a specific artistic purpose and try to mimic the style without understanding the substance. They copy the ornamentation but miss the architecture.
• The “Look at Me!” Syndrome: This is pure ego. The prose stops serving the story and starts serving the writer. Every sentence is a desperate plea for the reader to notice how clever the author is. But readers don’t read books to admire the author; they read books to feel something.

That writer with the four chapters? He asked me to go through and highlight every confusing line. I had to tell him the hard truth. “If I do that,” I said, “the entire document will be yellow with one or two white lines in between. This isn’t a line-by-line issue; it’s a foundational approach that needs to change.” I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was trying to help him see that clarity matters more than cleverness.

The Antidote: A Practical Guide to Clear, Powerful Prose

So you’ve recognized some of your own habits in the list above. Good. Admitting you have a problem is the first step. Now, here is a practical, no-nonsense guide to cleaning your dirty windows and letting your story shine through.

1. Read Your Work Aloud
   This is the single most effective tool against purple prose. Your ear will catch what your eye will miss. If you find yourself stumbling over a sentence, running out of breath, or cringing because it sounds pretentious when spoken, that sentence needs to be rewritten or cut. If a line of dialogue sounds like something no human would ever actually say, fix it. The ear knows. Trust it.
2. Hunt Down Your Adverbs
   Do a Ctrl+F search for in your document. Look at every single adverb you find. Challenge it. Is it necessary? Or is it propping up a weak verb? Nine times out of ten, you can replace the “verb + adverb” combination with a single, stronger verb.
   • ♦ Don’t write “she ran quickly.” Write “she sprinted,” “she dashed,” “she bolted.”
   • ♦ Don’t write “he looked angrily.” Write “he glared,” “he scowled.”
3. Put Your “Darlings” on Trial
   Go through your manuscript and find the sentences you are most proud of, the ones you think are pure literary genius. These are your “darlings.” Now, put them on trial for their crimes against clarity. More often than not, the sentences that feed our ego are the very ones that are slowing the story down. Be prepared to execute them for the greater good of the manuscript. It hurts, but it’s necessary.
4. Interrogate Your Metaphors
   For every single simile or metaphor, ask yourself this one simple question: Is the thing I am comparing it to more common, more familiar, and more easily understood than the thing I am describing?
   • ♦ “The wind sounded like a freight train.” Yes. Most people know what a freight train sounds like. It’s a good metaphor for a loud, powerful wind.
   • ♦ “The wind sounded like an asthmatic walrus.” No. It fails the test spectacularly. Cut it.
5. Prioritize Clarity and Accessibility
   It’s time for another hard truth, this one backed by data. According to literacy studies in the United States, over half of American adults read at or below a sixth-grade level. Now, this does not mean you should “dumb down” your writing. It means that if your prose is so complex that it requires a college-level reading ability to even be understood, you are shrinking your potential audience down to a tiny fraction of the market.
   Great storytelling is about communicating complex ideas and deep emotions in a clear, accessible way. Think of the universal power of a story like The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway’s prose is famously simple, yet it conveys immense depth and emotion. Your goal should be to write prose that a 12-year-old can understand but a 50-year-old can appreciate. That is the mark of a true master.
6. Describe with Sensory Details, Not Adjectives
   Instead of telling the reader a room is “creepy,” show them why it’s creepy. Engage the senses.
   • ♦ Purple (Telling): The room was scary, eerie, and unsettling.
   • ♦ Clear (Showing): The air in the room was cold enough to raise goosebumps on her arms. A thick layer of dust covered the furniture, smelling faintly of decay. The only sound was the slow, rhythmic drip, drip, drip of water from a stained patch on the ceiling.
   One version tells you how to feel. The other makes you feel it.

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Let Your Story Be the Star

Your job as a writer is to be invisible. Your prose should be so smooth, so clear, and so effective that the reader forgets you exist. They shouldn’t be thinking about your clever word choices; they should be living inside your character’s head, feeling their heart break, or racing alongside them as the clock runs out.

Stop performing. Stop trying to prove how smart you are. The greatest respect you can show your reader is to give them a story they can follow without a dictionary and a PhD.

Go back to your manuscript. Find the purple patches. And start cleaning the glass. Your readers—and your story—will thank you for it.