Purple prose

What even constitutes purple prose? Is it always bad? If its not, what separates good purple prose from bad purple prose

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Purple prose is prose that's verbose but doesn't achieve anything with that verbosity.

Thomas Pynchon is purple prose

What do you mean by "achieve"? Like just masturbatory flourish? Or style for style's sake?

Style for style's sake is fine, as long as it actually sounds good. If the verbosity serves some function - tells us something about the speaker, provides specificity, or just sounds good - then it's acceptable. If the prose is verbose but reads badly as a result, it's unacceptable.

Walter Pater is some pure purple prose bullshit.

Purple prose is always bad. It is over the top descriptive, poetic and emotionally exaggerated, but fake, cliched, illogical and pointless. Shakespeare wrote in an exaggerated manner, but he was still governed by rules of good taste, knew exactly where to stop and basically controlled everything to create a meaningful whole, not just pretty images.

I don't think that's completely it, good prose doesn't REQUIRE a good purpose or meaning

Purple prose is when the intricacy defeats itself and the illusion of good writing is shattered. Purple prose is when you can just feel how full the author was of himself when he wrote it.

>In pompous introductions, and such as promise a great deal, it generally happens that one or two verses of purple patch-work, that may make a great show, are tagged on; as when the grove and the altar of Diana and the meandering of a current hastening through pleasant fields, or the river Rhine, or the rainbow is described. But here there was no room for these [fine things]: perhaps, too, you know how to draw a cypress: but what is that to the purpose, if he, whe is painted for the given price, is [to be represented as] swimming hopeless out of a shipwreck? A large vase at first was designed: why, as the wheel revolves, turns out a little pitcher? In a word, be your subject what it will, let it be merely simple and uniform.

>The great majority of us poets, father, and youths worthy such a father, are misled by the appearance of right. I labor to be concise, I become obscure: nerves and spirit fail him, that aims at the easy: one, that pretends to be sublime, proves bombastical: he who is too cautious and fearful of the storm, crawls along the ground: he who wants to vary his subject in a marvelous manner, paints the dolphin in the woods, the boar in the sea. The avoiding of an error leads to a fault, if it lack skill.

This is often the mistake that people make-- Thomas Pynchon is the opposite of purple prose. Good examples of purple prose can be found in Stephen King's The Stand.

I do include 'reading nicely' as a good purpose.

steinbeck has his moments when describing dustbowl settings.

faulkner was a purpleprosefag

This is purple prose

If you don't understand why writing like this is hack shit, you don't deserve to post on Veeky Forums

purple prose is not just dense writing or lavish description -- its decidedly wonky and ill-formed, has no structure, rhythm or flow, is redundant, anti-climatic and uses shitty metaphors (poor metaphors are the hallmark of a shitter with no imaginative spark)

>Her pubes was a field of wheat after the harvest

Holy... I want more.

I want a passage equally self-indulging, but describing something evil, vile, gross, scatological even.

>her breasts were... soft, sweet cheese

I like it

I think this might be a joke. Good example of purple prose nonetheless

>your eyes are the sound of rain
kino. Where did you get an advance copy of the conclusion to Name of the Wind?

signal to noise ratio imbalance.

To be entirely honest, you will just need to develop an aesthetic intuition to tell what is verbose prose, especially at the higher levels. I know the feeling of searching for a definition of purple prose online and not getting a definitive answer, but that's the complex nature of writing and reading.

Honestly most people on here and even deep in the academy will have severe prejudice as to the quality of what their reading based on the reputation of the writer/work, and if you find someone who can spot and honestly analyse a piece of bad writing by someone like Woolf or Fitzgerald (I pick these two because they are great prose stylists but their styles are not so profoundly original like Joyce for example, that they become hard to critique in comparison to other writers) then take particular note of how they are reading the text.

Nabokov said that one of the four most important things in a reader was some level of artistic sense and that is what will allow you to spot things like purple prose, but really all the elements of craftsmanship that may be otherwise hidden. It's a difficult but very helpful skill to have.

Yep.

Thanks for writing this out, fampai. Extremely helpful.

these sound like of Montreal lyrics

>her buttock were fresh-baked loaves

Sun explodes into vision. Blackness replaced by a searing brown forces me to open my crusty eyes. Throwing my blanket off me and into the next room, and flipping one my pillows off the couch and into my glass of water from last night, spilling it, and the other into my flat-screen TV, tipping it over off the stand and breaking it. I waddle drunkenly, but really just exceptionally tiredly, to the window where I close the blinds, aptly named as the sun feels like its throwing sand in my eyes, before laying down and masturbating furiously.

>or

I am awakened by a fresh, bright sun raining through the window blinds. I sloppily rise from bed only to abruptly twist shut the blades and block out the light. Spring may be awake now, but not me.

It all does the same thing, but one gives a lot of unnecessary details, and the other gives just enough. Depending on style then, purple prose can be fucking annoying, crucial to the piece, or ironic and comical. But only if well done so.

This one made me hard desu

He knew

youtube.com/watch?v=7wEwwmE8OLk

>"You are quite beautiful, Princess Bronwyn,"

Nice.

>your eyes are the sound of rain

Purple prose is most often naive, whereas an artistic sensibility leads to sophisticated good taste.

Nice and accommodating.

Lol, holy fuck. This takes purple prose to a whole new level.
Part of me wants to believe that this is just a joke, but when it comes to awful writing...that is more than often not the case.

Am I a pleb if this made my weewee hard?

>Her buttocks were fresh-baked loaves
I'm in stitches, what the actual fuck lmao