Avoiding Bloated Prose

[Amaril]

I have a problem: I'm addicted to purple prose

I've had the sense for a long time that it was a problem in my writing. It just seems to be my natural tendency to ramble on and on about everything, piling adjectives on adjectives. Earlier tonight, I was reading Blood Meridian and got inspired to scribble something down with the goal of being as concise as possible, just to see how well I could do.

I was proud of the little bit I ended up with; I felt like it was a lot leaner than most of my work. When I showed it to my best friend, though, she described it as "a little overwrought". It was really dismaying.

Spoiler: Yes, the speech patterns are anachronistic for early medieval fantasy. They're supposed to be.

Show

It was near the beginning of my seventeenth spring that I first met Cole.

Heat hung like a fog over the tiny, nameless village. It was early for this weather, but after the deep cold of last winter, most were probably glad for it. I might have been myself, under better circumstances. The air seemed nearly solid, humidity making everything heavy and sticky. The sun was heading toward evening as I reached the outermost farms; the locals were just starting to return from the fields, wiping sweat from their brows.

“Hey,” I called to an old man reaching for the handle on his front door. With all the exhaustion and soreness the road had left me with, even the small effort of lifting my arm to wave seemed great. He stopped when he saw me, his head slow to turn. The look he fixed me with said my asking for his attention was a grievous intrusion. I almost turned around, then.

“Evening,” I said instead. “This town have an inn?”

He was silent for a long moment, still with that withering look. Finally, he jerked his head toward the path I was already on. “Sign o’ the grey cat,” he grunted. I waited, but he seemed to be done.

I nodded. “Thanks.” It seemed like there was more to say, but I couldn’t think what. I shouldered my heavy pack and lurched back into motion, my aching legs protesting.

The village proper was visible up ahead, a huddle of thatch-roofed log buildings. I thanked every god whose name I knew that I wouldn’t have to climb any more hills as I made my way in. More farmers noticed me as I passed, a scant few waving or calling out, but I had no energy left to acknowledge them. All my focus was on walking, one step at a time.

Does everyone have this problem? I know all the great writers say most of what they write gets edited out, but if this is what I come up with when I'm specifically trying to keep it simple, am I just beyond hope? How do I get better?

[jseah]

Give me some of that! Lol. I have the opposite problem, of having too little description.

High description:

Spoiler

Show

Cato walked and walked and walked. His throat was starting to dry and the sun was beginning to set but the forest seemed to just continue onwards without end.

The incline began to get steeper after another hour or so then the forest ended abruptly at a steep edge. That would be a good point to see where he was going.

The view of the valley was expansive. The side of the mountain he was on rolled downwards in thick forest until it abruptly gave way to meadows and what looked like crop fields. The crops weren't anything like he recognized however, there wasn't any cereal-like crop that was red in colour Cato knew of. There was a village down there, the houses clustered together behind a low wooden fence. A thin stream of smoke from the central fire and small figures moving around indicated that it was occupied.

Wood houses and a single dirt road leading out of the valley. He really was in the middle of nowhere. But maybe they could tell him the nearest city was.

Then Cato looked up and got the third shock today.

Hanging in the sky was a blood-red orb. Taking up almost a sixth of the sky, Cato could just about make out some cloud-like things on it. What the heck was that?! The moon was not supposed to be red!

The small observations since he woke up suddenly began to coalesce into an idea. It wasn't one he liked or wanted to believe but it made sense. Weird mushrooms, the twisty trees that didn't look like wood, the strange not-quite-rabbit that he spotted some time ago. That red moon. Especially the moon.

He wasn't on Earth.

Normal:

Spoiler

Show

The ex-war room was gloomy. A map of Minmay was half draped over the cafeteria table, covered with drawings and arrows. All of that lay abandoned by the circle of men and women leaning, lying and slouching wearily in their chairs.

It's over. That was the general atmosphere, one of relief and of helplessness.

"Casualties?" Chancellor Minmay asked.

"Knights, no reports," Hino raised one hand, still draped over the backrest of her seat.

"Guards, seven wounded in collapsing buildings, twenty killed by fire rain," Trev, the leader of the Minmay Guards reported. His salute, mimicking that of Earth's, looked less than crisp however.

"People, estimated four hundred dead," a Recordkeeper clerk said.

"Material loss?" Minmay asked again.

"Northwestern wing of the slums is completely burnt, there is nothing left of it. Further north, an area of roughly twenty fields is damaged or destroyed," Arthur said.

The same Recordkeeper clerk shuffled her notepad nervously. "By Cato's statistical methods, possessions destroyed are worth upwards of a thousand Rimes. That's a low estimate. The oil factory accounts for a third of it. We're lucky the fire only hit poorer slum areas. "

Gloomy silence descended once more.

"Anyone have any idea what happened?" Minmay asked, "have the knights heard of anything?"

"No one knows anything about that firestorm," Hino said, "it was too big to seriously stop, even with all the knights. If it had headed south instead of north, I would expect Minmay city to be a burning ruin. "

"Could it be a new monster?" Arthur asked.

"Who can say for sure?" Hino shrugged, "all witnesses agree that the cloud grew weaker and disappeared after leaving the city. Never seen a monster do that. "

"How did the fire start?"

No one looked up to find out who asked that question. No one answered it either. All the clues were buried somewhere in the charred rubble and probably destroyed with that chunk of the city.

What I can tell about that bit you posted is that your descriptions don't... flow. It's not overwhelmingly long but there are some parts that read awkwardly. Where the reader expects the next thing to occur, you instead get an elaboration of a description you already gave earlier in the sentence or in the previous sentence. (or get an elaboration that should have been the actual description itself)

Example:
He stopped when he saw me, his head slow to turn. The look he fixed me with said my asking for his attention was a grievous intrusion.

The second sentence of description should have been part of the first sentence, replacing the "slow to turn" part. If you still want it, you can try converting it into a verb.

Rewrite (jseah style):
"Hey," I saw an old man reaching for his front door and called out to him. Even the effort of lifting my arm to wave was almost too great, the long travel on the road had exhausted my strength. The man stopped and turned slowly to look at me, as if my call for his attention was a grievous intrusion. I almost gave up and turned around right there.

--------

Maybe you can rewrite one of my paragraphs and we can swap notes on how we interpreted/wrote each other's words?

[Lethologica]

Beyond hope? Never.

Blood Meridian's prose is spare in the extreme. Sentence fragments everywhere. Periods dominate its punctuation chart. It's not necessarily simple, of course. Consider: "The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her bosom the creature who would carry her off." But it's compact. Quite the opposite of fantasy's grandiose verbosity. That may be part of the trouble.

I wouldn't worry about scribbling compactly. Get material down first. Then cut, cut, cut. For example, here's a rewrite of the section from "Hey" to "done":

"Hey," I called out to an old man on his doorstep. I waved slightly; road-soreness made even that painful. "This town have an inn?"

He fixed me with a suspicious look. Plainly my intrusion was unwelcome. Tired as I was, I considered turning around.

"Sign o' the gray cat," he grunted, after a long moment. He jerked his chin down the path.

Half a sentence about exhaustion from travel becomes a phrase. The old man makes no unnecessary motions. His sharp look is described only once. There is only one pause. Result: half the word count.

Some content is lost. The narrator is less amiable, less patient. Maybe you want those qualities shown. You can also add material if trimming leaves your prose feeling too austere. The point is to excise unnecessary chatter; you decide what is necessary.

I'm no pro, so if my rewrite looks off, it probably is.

[Amaril]

Beyond hope? Never.

Blood Meridian's prose is spare in the extreme. Sentence fragments everywhere. Periods dominate its punctuation chart. It's not necessarily simple, of course. Consider: "The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her bosom the creature who would carry her off." But it's compact. Quite the opposite of fantasy's grandiose verbosity. That may be part of the trouble.

I wouldn't worry about scribbling compactly. Get material down first. Then cut, cut, cut. For example, here's a rewrite of the section from "Hey" to "done":

"Hey," I called out to an old man on his doorstep. I waved slightly; road-soreness made even that painful. "This town have an inn?"

He fixed me with a suspicious look. Plainly my intrusion was unwelcome. Tired as I was, I considered turning around.

"Sign o' the gray cat," he grunted, after a long moment. He jerked his chin down the path.

Half a sentence about exhaustion from travel becomes a phrase. The old man makes no unnecessary motions. His sharp look is described only once. There is only one pause. Result: half the word count.

Some content is lost. The narrator is less amiable, less patient. Maybe you want those qualities shown. You can also add material if trimming leaves your prose feeling too austere. The point is to excise unnecessary chatter; you decide what is necessary.

I'm no pro, so if my rewrite looks off, it probably is.

Very true about McCarthy, and I don't think I want to be quite that terse. I know fantasy tends to be really verbose, and I'm conflicted about how to work with that. On the one hand, I can't help but feel that fantasy's purple prose makes it inherently inferior to more highly-regarded writing, or that the best fantasy is that which forsakes the purple as much as possible. On the other hand, the fact that our culture seems to consider modern realism the only acceptable form of prose, to which all must aspire, kinda bugs me, and part of me wants to defy that trend. I guess it's just a matter of taste, and I need to figure out mine.

You make some good edits, though I do feel like the final product ends up a little more sparse than I'd want. The narrator is supposed to be amiable and patient, so I don't want to lose out on that.

Do you agree with jseah that my descriptions don't flow well? I feel like I know what they're trying to say with that, but I'm having trouble really seeing it myself, or finding other places where it's a problem. Maybe hearing it pointed out another way would help.

Give me some of that! Lol. I have the opposite problem, of having too little description.

High description:

Spoiler

Show

Cato walked and walked and walked. His throat was starting to dry and the sun was beginning to set but the forest seemed to just continue onwards without end.

The incline began to get steeper after another hour or so then the forest ended abruptly at a steep edge. That would be a good point to see where he was going.

The view of the valley was expansive. The side of the mountain he was on rolled downwards in thick forest until it abruptly gave way to meadows and what looked like crop fields. The crops weren't anything like he recognized however, there wasn't any cereal-like crop that was red in colour Cato knew of. There was a village down there, the houses clustered together behind a low wooden fence. A thin stream of smoke from the central fire and small figures moving around indicated that it was occupied.

Wood houses and a single dirt road leading out of the valley. He really was in the middle of nowhere. But maybe they could tell him the nearest city was.

Then Cato looked up and got the third shock today.

Hanging in the sky was a blood-red orb. Taking up almost a sixth of the sky, Cato could just about make out some cloud-like things on it. What the heck was that?! The moon was not supposed to be red!

The small observations since he woke up suddenly began to coalesce into an idea. It wasn't one he liked or wanted to believe but it made sense. Weird mushrooms, the twisty trees that didn't look like wood, the strange not-quite-rabbit that he spotted some time ago. That red moon. Especially the moon.

He wasn't on Earth.

Normal:

Spoiler

Show

The ex-war room was gloomy. A map of Minmay was half draped over the cafeteria table, covered with drawings and arrows. All of that lay abandoned by the circle of men and women leaning, lying and slouching wearily in their chairs.

It's over. That was the general atmosphere, one of relief and of helplessness.

"Casualties?" Chancellor Minmay asked.

"Knights, no reports," Hino raised one hand, still draped over the backrest of her seat.

"Guards, seven wounded in collapsing buildings, twenty killed by fire rain," Trev, the leader of the Minmay Guards reported. His salute, mimicking that of Earth's, looked less than crisp however.

"People, estimated four hundred dead," a Recordkeeper clerk said.

"Material loss?" Minmay asked again.

"Northwestern wing of the slums is completely burnt, there is nothing left of it. Further north, an area of roughly twenty fields is damaged or destroyed," Arthur said.

The same Recordkeeper clerk shuffled her notepad nervously. "By Cato's statistical methods, possessions destroyed are worth upwards of a thousand Rimes. That's a low estimate. The oil factory accounts for a third of it. We're lucky the fire only hit poorer slum areas. "

Gloomy silence descended once more.

"Anyone have any idea what happened?" Minmay asked, "have the knights heard of anything?"

"No one knows anything about that firestorm," Hino said, "it was too big to seriously stop, even with all the knights. If it had headed south instead of north, I would expect Minmay city to be a burning ruin. "

"Could it be a new monster?" Arthur asked.

"Who can say for sure?" Hino shrugged, "all witnesses agree that the cloud grew weaker and disappeared after leaving the city. Never seen a monster do that. "

"How did the fire start?"

No one looked up to find out who asked that question. No one answered it either. All the clues were buried somewhere in the charred rubble and probably destroyed with that chunk of the city.

What I can tell about that bit you posted is that your descriptions don't... flow. It's not overwhelmingly long but there are some parts that read awkwardly. Where the reader expects the next thing to occur, you instead get an elaboration of a description you already gave earlier in the sentence or in the previous sentence. (or get an elaboration that should have been the actual description itself)

Example:
He stopped when he saw me, his head slow to turn. The look he fixed me with said my asking for his attention was a grievous intrusion.

The second sentence of description should have been part of the first sentence, replacing the "slow to turn" part. If you still want it, you can try converting it into a verb.

Rewrite (jseah style):
"Hey," I saw an old man reaching for his front door and called out to him. Even the effort of lifting my arm to wave was almost too great, the long travel on the road had exhausted my strength. The man stopped and turned slowly to look at me, as if my call for his attention was a grievous intrusion. I almost gave up and turned around right there.

--------

Maybe you can rewrite one of my paragraphs and we can swap notes on how we interpreted/wrote each other's words?

Alright, let's see...

Spoiler: First sample, Amaril-style.

Show

Cato walked and walked, and then kept walking, his throat starting to hurt from dryness. Above, the sun began to set, but the forest showed no sign of thinning.

After another hour or so, the incline started to rise. Then, finally, the trees suddenly ended, the path arriving at a steep drop. Ahead, he had a clear view of where he was going.

A valley stretched out below him. The mountainside rolled down from where he stood, hidden beneath more thick forest, which gave way at the base of the mountain to meadows and what looked like crop fields. It all looked familiar enough, until Cato took a closer look at the crops. He squinted to see detail in the distance. They looked like some kind of cereal grain, but they were red. He’d never heard of a plant like that.

Beyond the fields was a village, the houses clustered together behind a low wooden fence. A thin stream of smoke rose from a central fire, and he could see small figures moving about.

Wood houses and one dirt road, he thought. This really is the middle of nowhere. Still, though, it seemed like his best chance of finding help.

Then Cato looked up, and got his third shock that day.

An enormous blood-red sphere hung above, taking up what must have been a whole sixth of the sky. Cato could just make out forms moving across its surface—they almost looked like clouds. He did a double-take. What the hell? Is that the moon? The moon isn’t supposed to be red!

Suddenly, the little things he’d seen since he’d woken up started to fall into place, forming an idea—one he didn’t like, or want to believe, but that made too much sense to discount. The weird mushrooms. The twisty trees that didn’t look like wood. The rabbit-thing that wasn’t a rabbit. The red moon. Especially the red moon.

I’m not on Earth, am I?

I think most of what I did was breaking up the introduction of the alien elements, so they happen more gradually and are each given more attention as they come up. They seemed to be the focus of the scene to me, and I think introducing them more slowly mirrors the way your character notices and reacts to them. That's my take, anyway. I also changed a few things from narrator statements to character thought--I like including at least a little of that. I feel like it makes the character seem more alive, while never doing it can give the impression that they're just a construct being moved by the narrator. Again, just my preference. I don't know if it says anything relevant about our respective styles.

Sorry if I'm being dense with your comment about flow--the way I wrote it seems natural to me (y'know, because I wrote it that way), but I'm probably just having trouble breaking from my own tendencies and seeing it the way you see it.

[Lethologica]

Very true about McCarthy, and I don't think I want to be quite that terse. I know fantasy tends to be really verbose, and I'm conflicted about how to work with that. On the one hand, I can't help but feel that fantasy's purple prose makes it inherently inferior to more highly-regarded writing, or that the best fantasy is that which forsakes the purple as much as possible. On the other hand, the fact that our culture seems to consider modern realism the only acceptable form of prose, to which all must aspire, kinda bugs me, and part of me wants to defy that trend. I guess it's just a matter of taste, and I need to figure out mine.

You make some good edits, though I do feel like the final product ends up a little more sparse than I'd want. The narrator is supposed to be amiable and patient, so I don't want to lose out on that.

Do you agree with jseah that my descriptions don't flow well? I feel like I know what they're trying to say with that, but I'm having trouble really seeing it myself, or finding other places where it's a problem. Maybe hearing it pointed out another way would help.

Florid prose has its own place, to be sure. One could hardly find a more highly regarded writer than Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for example:

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

See also this post for fantasy-specific examples.

For that matter, modern realism is popular more for its accessibility than for its artistic virtues. My edits are specifically maximizing brevity; I wouldn't say they represent a suggested end product.

With respect to descriptive flow, there are a few layers. Sometimes your phrasing is awkward, e.g. "The sun was heading toward evening," "My asking for his attention." Sometimes you choose an odd or inconsistent characteristic to emphasize. Is the first thing we need to know about the old man the fact that he was reaching for the handle on his front door? (Does the narrator know it's his front door? Did the narrator not see him until he was reaching?) How can the old man stop when he sees the narrator and then be slow to turn his head to see the narrator? Sometimes it's the arrangement. The humidity comment in the first paragraph is fine by itself, but it isn't motivated by the previous sentence and it doesn't motivate the following sentence (though the sweat could become a connection). The backpack doesn't show up until the end of the conversation, and its weight isn't really present in the piece, which made the narrator's exhaustion/soreness less impactful. Same for the hills.

This is all very analytical. I don't know that I have a general idea to communicate from it.

[hustlertwo]

You also need to consider where your strengths and weaknesses are. If you tend to do better writing descriptive prose than dialogue, then it is not the worst thing to rely on it a bit more. With the understanding that you should go no more than two or at absolute most three sentences without something actually happening, instead of just being described. So for example, cut at least half out of the weather-describing paragraph, and compress the intro of the old man by a line or two (like a lot of the rewrites have done). But you do have to consider that no one is beyond hope, and also, there's interest in every kind of writing. None of them are wrong....some just have a lot less mainstream appeal than others. And some genres lend themselves more to this kind of embellishment.

[Cealocanth]

Spoiler: Yes, the speech patterns are anachronistic for early medieval fantasy. They're supposed to be.

Show

It was near the beginning of my seventeenth spring that I first met Cole.

Heat hung like a fog over the tiny, nameless village. It was early for this weather, but after the deep cold of last winter, most were probably glad for it. I might have been myself, under better circumstances. The air seemed nearly solid, humidity making everything heavy and sticky. The sun was heading toward evening as I reached the outermost farms; the locals were just starting to return from the fields, wiping sweat from their brows.

“Hey,” I called to an old man reaching for the handle on his front door. With all the exhaustion and soreness the road had left me with, even the small effort of lifting my arm to wave seemed great. He stopped when he saw me, his head slow to turn. The look he fixed me with said my asking for his attention was a grievous intrusion. I almost turned around, then.

“Evening,” I said instead. “This town have an inn?”

He was silent for a long moment, still with that withering look. Finally, he jerked his head toward the path I was already on. “Sign o’ the grey cat,” he grunted. I waited, but he seemed to be done.

I nodded. “Thanks.” It seemed like there was more to say, but I couldn’t think what. I shouldered my heavy pack and lurched back into motion, my aching legs protesting.

The village proper was visible up ahead, a huddle of thatch-roofed log buildings. I thanked every god whose name I knew that I wouldn’t have to climb any more hills as I made my way in. More farmers noticed me as I passed, a scant few waving or calling out, but I had no energy left to acknowledge them. All my focus was on walking, one step at a time.

Does everyone have this problem? I know all the great writers say most of what they write gets edited out, but if this is what I come up with when I'm specifically trying to keep it simple, am I just beyond hope? How do I get better?

You're not too descriptive, not by a long shot. For some writers, mildly extensive prose is a strength because it helps the reader visualize the scene. There are a few things you could do, though. These are my tricks, at least. I tend to be a bit prose-heavy as well.

“Hey,” I called to an old man reaching for the handle on his front door. With all the exhaustion and soreness the road had left me with, even the small effort of lifting my arm to wave seemed great. He stopped when he saw me, his head slow to turn. The look he fixed me with said my asking for his attention was a grievous intrusion. I almost turned around, then.

Could become:

“Hey,” I called to an old man reaching for the handle of his front door. My arm ached as I lifted it to greet him, protesting the wear of my travels. He turned his head slowly and shot me a disgruntled scowl. I could have turned around then.

So, to describe the changes, I personified the character's arm in order to add more power to the description without ruining the pacing. I employed more descriptive words in order to convey more information in the same amount of time, as well as add something of a refinement of language. I used the active voice to make the verbs pull more of their weight ('He turned his head slowly' being more powerful and less long-winded than 'his head [was] slow to turn.' The 'was' is implicit, in this case, but the point is the same.) Lastly, I played a little with tense to make the last sentence read a little easier to maintain pacing. You do lose a little with the shortened prose, though. There are some places where purple prose is a useful thing.

[Rift_Wolf]

This isn't the *worst* bloated prose I've ever read. Though this may be a comment on the standard of books I read.

You've got some good description of a heat wave in the first paragraph, but there's no sense of what it means until the end of the paragraph when you find out the main characters walking through it. If you started out with the main character doing something (kicking a stone along the dust path, fanning himself with his hat; something that indicates there's a person in the scene rather than just a scene being described by a narrator) then you could probably keep a lot of that description. Also, there's too much of a jump from the first line (17th spring I met Cole) to first paragraph (omniscient description of heat wave). Maybe if you had a bit more of a lead-in, like 'I'd travelled X days through a heat wave, on the way to his village' or something.

The next part about the old man needs squishing down. A lot. Say the words 'grievous intrusion' to yourself five times; its an example of what I call 'wordy word words'. I use them in first drafts all the time; they're words which stand out against other words as being too wordy. There's a time and place for grievous intrusion. Maybe when a judge is reading out a list of legal offences.

You also jump around as to where you're describing. The heat haze over the village is at the start of the passage but we don't see the village till the end. Ultimately, I'd ask 'how important is the journey into the village?' Do we need to know anymore than he's travelled in the sun and is exhausted? If not, then an editor would blue-pencil this whole section and have the character entering the inn as the first paragraph.

Sorry if this seems harsh. I've tried to keep constructive, as I think there's some good description in the passage. Just way too much in the wrong places.

[Thanqol]

Read everything out loud all the time. If it makes you sound like a crazy person, good. If you ever read one of your own sentences and trip over it, or it doesn't flow naturally, cut it. Structure sentences and punctuation around breaths. Short and punchy. Like a midget boxer.

Writing and then reading poetry is, in my opinion, the single best thing you can do to improve your prose. Especially minimalistic poetry. Every word perfect, like a drop of ice water hanging from the fat lip of a razor.