“Purple prose” is one of the harshest critiques you can hear about your writing. Meaning overly lyrical, stuffed with unnecessary imagery, and elaborate to the point of confusion, purple prose implies that you take yourself more seriously than your actual skills deserve. 

This criticism is especially hard to hear because it’s not about any of your story choices—it’s about the actual style of your writing, which, for most people, is very hard to change. A plot can be reworked to have more action, characters can be given stronger motivations, dialogue can be made to sound more realistic, but the bones of your writing style are deeply personal. And if you try to change them on purpose, you’ll likely just make it worse. 

Luckily, there are steps you can take to improve your prose style, and none of them involve abandoning your own personal expression. 

Change Up Your Reading Habits

The biggest influence on your writing is your reading. So what kinds of books are you picking up these days? 

It’s not that there’s any kind of reading that’s inherently bad. But purple prose might indicate that you need to make different kinds of choices to help your own writing in a different way. For example, if you read all the time but from only one prolific author, you might be subconsciously trying to imitate their style and that effort is likely just resulting in overworked prose. As another example, it’s great to read outside of your genre, but if you’re only reading books completely opposite to what you’re trying to write, you may also be setting yourself up with only a vague point of view in your own sphere, which will also result in overworking your writing.

Purple prose often demonstrates the exact problem it covers up: Your reader has to try too hard to read around all your flowery details because you were trying too hard to get words on the page. Reading a healthy variety, and plenty in your chosen genre, will get your brain moving a little more smoothly, and then you won’t feel the need to overcompensate with the same overly dramatic metaphors. 

Only Essentials 

Overuse of metaphor and simile is a hallmark of purple prose, so if that’s one of your problems, there’s an exercise you can practice to create a better sense of when you need to add dramatic flair and when you need to let the reader use their own imagination. 

The next time you’re headed out of dialogue and into a longer, descriptive sentence, write everything out first with zero literary imagery. Don’t even use adjectives. Write something like, “There is a chair in the middle of the room next to a table. The table is set for breakfast. The sun is shining through the window.”

Then ask yourself what your reader needs to know. Is the table old and rickety, or is it made of solid, expensive wood? Is breakfast watery porridge or eggs with bacon and toast? Is the weak sunlight muddied by polluted city air, or is it a bright yellow light out on a lush farm?

Really ask yourself what your reader needs to know and that might help prune back anything you were putting in because you were overcompensating or simply thought of a phrase that would be fun to use. 

Where Is This Coming From?

Being accused of writing purple prose might sting especially hard if you are a woman, writing romance, or both, because it can be the kind of criticism leveraged as a misogynistic put-down. But that doesn’t mean women can’t write romance novels with legitimate purple problems. So how do you tell the difference? 

It’s important to work on not reacting defensively to criticism. If you tell yourself that everyone who gives you feedback is “just jealous” or they “just don’t get it,” you’re never going to improve. But not everyone is going to like your style, and there is such a thing as bad faith criticism. So, again, how do you tell the difference between weaponized belittlement and authentic feedback? 

You should always try and get comments from a wide range of people. If your writer’s group has consistent feedback except for one person who seems like they read something completely different than the others, they just may not be your target audience. Or if you’re the one who thinks your pen is getting purple and you aren’t hearing that from anyone else, you might just be overly critical of your own work, in the same way that many actors don’t like to watch themselves on-screen. 

Just Keep Writing

Purple prose can come from any number of places: inexperience, insecurity, narrow reading habits, maybe just a bad day. Something as close to the bone as your actual writing style can be hard to pinpoint. 

Regardless of whatever methods you try to change it, the most important thing is that you keep on writing. Continuing to practice your craft will inevitably take you through different stages and styles and will help you build up enough confidence to identify real problems, letting any critiques that aren’t actually helpful slide. As long as you don’t let the purple accusations discourage you from writing, the problem will likely work itself out one way or another. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.