September 18, 2025

on purple prose

so i love a metaphor! sue me! or...come see me on tour?

news

The Everlasting, which comes out on october 28th, which is apparently next month, has had an embarrassingly nice september. she got starred reviews from publisher’s weekly, library journal, booklist. she’s a libraryreads pick for october and one of bookpage’s most anticipated fall books. and…she’s coming to see all of you! my tour schedule is available here (heads up: lots of these events require tickets or registration!).

oh, and i’m giving away one of my physical arcs. sign up for this newsletter to enter (button below), or–if you’re already a subscriber– submit this form. open internationally, closes 9/20.

on purple prose

assume, before we begin, that i’ve provided a comprehensive list of caveats and exemptions. assume i’ve assured you that there are many, many kinds of good prose (obviously), that “purple” prose is a subjective judgement (it is), and that readers ought to be permitted their own preferences without shame (sure). assume someone in the comments has already accused me of classism for suggesting that dense or intricate prose is better than other kinds of writing; assume i have gently dismantled them for implying that poor people can’t fucking read.

and now, indulge me. (this is an essay about indulgence).

“purple prose” is not so much a description of style as it is a criminal charge: it refers to prose that is too ornate, too flowery, too pretty. i didn’t know until i googled it that it comes from the ars poetica, a wonderfully bitchy roman poem about all the annoying habits of other roman poets.¹ here’s the section about purpureus pannus:

Weighty openings and grand declarations often
Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam
Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar,
The winding stream hastening through lovely fields,
Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described.
There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how
To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given
Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck
In despair?

the best part of this is, of course, how purple it is. later, horace says the best poets are the ones “who can blend usefulness and sweetness.” get to the point! he says, but please--do it prettily.

this i think gets at the contradictory heart of what prose does, which is to waste the reader’s time as efficiently and sexily as possible. it’s an act of faith, or an exchange: a reader gives you their time, and you tell them, word by word, how to spend it.

and each genre has pretty specific rules about time. in children's fiction, as in poetry, you have to be quick as hell while pretending you have all the time in the world (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”). in romance, a single glance or touch or orgasm can last pages and pages, the moment blown out like hot glass to encompass the characters’ pasts, futures, desires, and daddy issues. a caper must caper along; a sprawling epic must sprawl.

you won’t be surprised to hear that i’ve always had a soft spot for books in any genre that refuse to be rushed. books that indulge and luxuriate—not only in their themes or aesthetics—but in language itself. the kinds of books, in other words, that get two stars on goodreads: too slow. purple prose 🤢. should have been 500 pages shorter.²

it’s an attitude that’s become pretty pervasive, honestly, among both readers and writers. there’s a trend toward prose that is cleaner, simpler, sleeker, more easily excerpted for instagram posts. paragraphs are getting shorter, and so are sentences, and so are the words themselves. style is less important than a kind of clunking, netflix-ish clarity, which resolves every ambiguity almost before it can emerge. (“so if we found him we could stop the development and save cooper’s chase and the destruction of the cemetery?” says a character halfway through the thursday murder club movie, poorly summarizing the plot in case we were scrolling on our phones.)

you can find this trend in lots of genres, i think, but it’s easiest for me to see in romance.³ consider–for contrast–this passage from Judith Ivory’s 1991 historical romance/extended work of Middlemarch fanfic, Black Silk:

The large disasters, Submit would recall later, do not come announced with either bright trumpets or the dark baying of hounds. The larger disasters of life are usually laid and stored and built of ordinary things, assembled over time by one’s own device, so that one feels almost on friendly terms with all the little bits and pieces; the false convictions, the unresolved incongruities. One lives always, Henry used to say, with the components of one’s own undoing. Yet seldom had Submit ever seen calamity assemble so quietly, so calmly, into so ferocious a mess as it did in the next twenty-four hours.

don’t you just want to eat it? to roll around in it like a cat on hot concrete? ms. ivory will draw a cypress tree if she damn well pleases!! or, consider Laura Kinsale’s equally edible Flowers from the Storm (1992), which is so invested in language that both primary characters are defined by it–one has severe aphasia, and the other employs the arch thees and thous of quaker’s plain speech. it’s full of brief and gorgeous asides like this:

It was just the sort of garden Maddy had always wished to have for herself—mostly practical, but with a corner saved for something vivid and wondrous, something not at all useful save in its own joyous fantasy.

i won’t quote from any more recent writers for comparison, because i’m not that much of a dick, and because this isn’t an essay about how writers used to be good and now they’re bad (untrue, boring). i think it’s an essay about my fear that we have pruned our gardens too ruthlessly, and saved no corners for the impractical, the vivid and wondrous, the joyous and fantastic. that we call prose “purple” because we’ve gotten too used to prose without any color at all.

and like, of course language changes over time! fads come and go! but fads never arrive by accident. there are reasons for our aesthetic and artistic trends, and the reasons behind this one trouble me.

i worry that the preference for clean, frictionless, unornamented prose is symptomatic of our increasingly consumer-brained approach to art, where the “best” art is whatever goes down the easiest. i worry that our attention spans are so thoroughly deep-fried that we no longer have the patience for long sentences or semi-colons. i worry that 54% of american adults read below a 6th grade level, and children aren’t reading for pleasure anymore, and most parents don’t enjoy reading to their kids (!!!). 

i worry not because i’m an author and these things threaten my livelihood (although they do, i guess), and not because i’m a wet-eyed liberal with a library tote bag who still misses wishbone (although i am and i do)—but because a rejection of complex language is a rejection of complexity itself. if we aren’t willing to engage with the ambiguous or confusing, the challenging or messy or idiosyncratic or subtle or superfluously, impractically beautiful–then we are left with the short and simple, the easy and efficient.

and that is, frankly, kind of dangerous.

fascists, for example, tell stories of total and perfect clarity. there is a bad guy and a good guy, a simple problem with a (violently) simple solution, and nothing–not empathy, not basic math, not reality itself–is permitted to complicate it. there’s no room for anything disruptive or surprising or nuanced or–god forbid–hot. this is perhaps why the right is so obsessed with AI: it’s the idea of art without any of art’s complexity. art without labor, cost, intention, specificity, or joy; art that no one, neither producer nor consumer, has to spend any time on at all.

and look: i’m not saying the average grade level of prose on kindle unlimited is the reason democracy is dying!! i’m not even saying every book should use words like “unblenching” and “imbricate,”⁴ although, you know, why not?? i’m just saying: maybe easy isn’t the highest or best function of prose. maybe it's not a crime or a failure, to require a little more of our time.

personally, i want inefficient books, full of indulgence and excess and complication. i want immoderate, slatternly sentences, which flaunt themselves, rather than striving at all times toward modest invisibility. i want lilac prose, shading toward violet, flirting with mauve. i want prose that is not at all useful–save in its own joyous fantasy.

further reading:

• felicia davin’s excellent essay on Black Silk caused me to re-read it, and to write this. truly davin speaks for us all when she says: “I don’t wanna read a love story about two nice people having a reasonable conversation and deciding to start a relationship. I wanna see two freaks fuck it up bigtime!”
• margaret killjoy’s "revolutions are built on failure" made me cry a couple of times, and NOT just because i’m still stuck on andor.
• sarah gailey's keynote speech, "read like a criminal," is one of the best summary's of american censorship and the criminality of fiction you'll ever find. if i was still teaching, i'd assign it.