Purple vs Lyrical Prose

Prose can be beautiful and effective

For everyone who’s ever read anything I’ve written, you know I’m prone to flowery prose. This is also my preference when reading! It’s, however, tricky to set a boundary between “lyrical” and “purple”, and not end up exchanging substance for form.

So, when I see someone saying “I prefer purple prose”, I often ask myself if they know the distinction.

Purple prose is not just when the writing is ornate—it’s when it becomes so ornate, you can’t tell what a sentence is supposed to mean. It’s when you see the writer, not the story; the literary mechanisms they’re using, instead of the characters, world, and plot. The corridors are so serpentine that you end up lost.

You can be metaphorical, full of emotion (even a touch melodramatic) without it turning uncomprehensible. Not every sentence needs to be “quotable”. Your prose doesn’t have to be flat, super dry and to the point, either! There’s definitely a balance to strike. Books that are considered classics often manage to add subtext and subtly and emotion without it swallowing the plot whole.

I’ll make up an example of purple prose, and then show you something I consider “florid” but not overly-ornate.

Purple:

He kneeled on the could ground, cold as the stone of their altar might be, like a believer would kneel in front of their god. This was not a question—it was a contract to be bound between two souls, eternally, for nothing else would satisfy him but to have and to hold her until their flesh trimmed down to bone, and that bone crumbled into dust. And if they were to be buried instead, let the soil swallow them together, so that the same worms may feed on both their carcasses.

“My heart cannot beat without yours first deciding on a rythm for it to follow,” he said. “I wish for us never to be apart, neither on this earth, nor in the heavens above. Please, my love, let me shackle our tired lungs together, breathe the same air—forever. Say you’ll marry me, dearest.”

I could have just said: “He asked her to marry him.”

I could, of couse, have made it prettier than that. I didn’t need to go on about it for two entire paragraphs.

Lyrical:

“Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

This one is so simple, isn’t it? Still beautiful, still effective. This man enjoys reading, and his room feels naked without his books.

“That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

This one is more ornate than the first one, but I think it fits the tone of the book very well. Deathless is a moody, folklore-heavy dark fantasy, and its characters are like prototypes, fated to do the same thing over and over.

You know you're bright as the morning, as soft as the rain
Pretty as a vine, as sweet as a grape
If you can sit in a barrel, maybe I'll wait
Until that day

I'd rather take my whiskey neat
My coffee black and my bed at three
You're too sweet for me

― Hozier, Too Sweet

Though I should include Hozier, because this man is the king of lyricism. Don’t touch me. Throughout the song, he insults this unamed woman over and over, by using “sweet” as something prejorative. She’s sweet as sugar! Pity he likes his coffee black.

I’ve been using “florid” and “lyrical” interchangeably, but I’ve also seen people using flowery/florid to mean purple prose. I think you should hopefully get my meaning either way!

Purple is when the meaning of a sentence is lost in all the details.

Lyrical is when, yes, it’s beautiful, but it retains its meaning. It’s vivid, descriptive, but it isn’t using pompous language just to sound smarter/more poetic. The metaphors are relevant to the context of this world/characters. It’s something they would use and makes sense knowing who these characters are.

Look at the purple prose example I made up again. Imagine writing a whole book like that. Exhausting, right? Now, imagine still wanting your voice to sound a certain way, but being more sparse with your flowery language. Much easier! The editing phase is a good time to look at the sentence level and add similes, metaphors, etc, without you having to spend the drafting process laboring over every paragraph to make it sound utterly convoluted.

That’s all, folks! I had fun trying to come up with a purply example, but I also think I might have broken my brain. Worth it (?).