Overwritten Prose

Sometimes writers, especially new writers, feel that in order to write in a writerly or serious or studious manner, they must put on their Prose Stylist hats and churn out pages of paragraphs that are as fancy as possible. Every phrase must paint a 1,000-word picture for the reader, and plain language must be chased off the page. Because, they feel, good writing is elaborate. This is a mistaken idea.

Sometimes, yes, good writing is complex and elaborate and highly filigreed, filled with detail and running rhythms and rhymes and heaven knows what else. But most of the time, good writing is elegant and says only as much as it needs to say.

Suppose, for example, Arthur Author wants to say that one of his characters, Jack, is walking across the room to pick up a pen. Arthur sits down to his iBook and types:

Jack walked across the room and picked up a pen.

But perhaps Arthur feels that's boring, too plain and not literary. And he wants to put in Jack's emotion during the scene. So he types some more:

Jack walked angrily across the room, snatching up the pen in his fist.

"That's much better," Arthur thinks. "But what's this room? I haven't said a word about it yet." More typing:

Jack walked angrily across the dark blue carpeted floor of the sunlit library, glaring at the shelves of well-worn books that lined the walls as he snatched up the antique gold fountain pen from the walnut secretary that had been in his family for generations.

"That's brilliant," Arthur says. "If I could work a simile into this, it would be perfect."

Arthur Author has just clogged up a perfectly good sentence by overwriting it with detail that isn't part of the essential thought. The reader, when she hits this sentence, will have no idea at all what the important information is: Jack walked across the room and picked up a pen. There is too much going on all at once in Arthur's final version. The sense of the sentence has been buried under an avalanche of adjectives, adverbs and cliches. Most of what Arthur has written is beside the point.

Let's try a different example, the opening paragraphs of a short story.

Opening Paragraphs, Version One:

The low hills lying in rows across the dry, narrow valley of the Ebro were long and dirty off-white tinged with streaks of brownish yellow, like the exposed teeth of an old grinning plowhorse. This side of the dusty valley was hot as an oven; there was no relieving shade and no sheltering trees and the overheated adobe station was forever trapped between two sharp running lines of heat-shimmering train rails in the blistering afternoon sun. Close against the side of the lonely station there was the warm, choking shadow of the claustrophobic building and a still curtain, made of vibrantly-colored strings of brightly-painted bamboo beads, hung slantingly across the open door into the dark, mysterious bar, to keep out unwanted buzzing flies. The tall, athletic American in his light suit and hat and the beautiful, blonde girl with him sat at a small rickety table in the hot shade, outside the isolated building. It was very hot, like a desert, and the express from Barcelona would come chugging down the rails in forty minutes. It stopped briefly at this lonely junction for a spare two minutes and went to Madrid.

'What should we drink?' the girl asked quietly, wiping her glowing face with the back of one delicate hand. She had taken off her straw hat and put it on the round, white-painted table.

'It's pretty hot,' the man said tiredly.

Huh? How about this instead:

Opening Paragraphs, Version Two:

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

'What should we drink?' the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

'It's pretty hot,' the man said.

See the difference? Version Two is in fact the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's amazing short story, "Hills Like White Elephants." Version One is an immensely overwritten form of it. If you happen to prefer Version One of this, you need to sit down and pay attention.

Version One is purple prose, though I often see stuff that's a great deal worse than this, written in all seriousness. Nobody should write this way. It's simply too much. Every noun has a modifying adjective, every verb has an adverb, and every description has a bad simile. Too much.

Overwritten writing usually attempts to carry too much information, and becomes indistinct. If every noun or verb in a sentence is supposed to carry descriptive data (that is, has an adjective or adverb that is supposed to mean something important to the reader), it becomes difficult to figure out what's actually the subject of the sentence, what the point of the writing is. This is why we're told to strike out adverbs and excess adjectives: a sentence should, ideally, be about A Single Thing, and you should aim the reader at that one thing only. If you want to say more than one thing, or have a complex idea to get across, it is preferable to break your thoughts into more than one sentence, with one thought per sentence. You cannot say everything at once, and it's not polite to talk with your mouth full, anyway.

So my advice is simple: write directly, and just tell the story. Don't be fooled into thinking that you have to put onto paper something that looks like literature, or that you have to reach for grandiloquence with every sentence. You don't. Elegance is eloquence. Strive for clarity and know what you're writing about.

UN- Purple Prose, A Contemporary Example

Yesterday, I described how details can be used to reveal character along with other components of a story using a passage from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Today, I'm looking at a more modern piece of literature to show that details can also be used to flesh out a setting while also performing literary acrobatics to entertain the reader. This is a passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, a book that was so emotional for me, that at one point, I closed it after reading a scene because I wanted to stay frozen in the moment for as long as I could.

Here's the first paragraph of the second chapter from this wonderful book:

It was March 18, 1791, when Trachim B's double-axle wagon either did or did not pin him against the bottom of the Brod River. The young W twins were the first to see the curious flotsam rising to the surface: wandering snakes of white string, a crushed velvet glove with outstretched fingers, barren spools, schmootzy pince-nez, rasp- and boysenberries, feces, frillwork, the shards of a shattered atomizer, the bleeding red-ink script of a resolution: I will...I will...

On one hand, this is just a list of details. But, if you read it out loud, you'll hear some beautiful alliteration (wandering snakes of white string; feces, frillwork) and also some beautiful awkward alliteration (schmootzy pince-nez), and I always laugh at the ridiculousness of the phrase rasp- and boysenberries. Foer is able to be at once funny and graceful, a skill that ends up working even more beautifully in later emotional scenes of this book.

Just a few paragraphs later, there are more descriptions of these items drifting up out of the water when one of the W twins, Chana, goes into the water to explore:

She picked up the hands of a baby doll, and those of a grandfather clock. Umbrella ribs. A skeleton key. The articles rose on the crowns of bubbles that burst when they reached the surface. The slightly young and less cautious twin raked her fingers through the water and each time came up with something new: a yellow-pinwheel, a muddy hand mirror, the petals of some sunken forget-me-not, silt and cracked black pepper, a packet of seeds…

Foer is able to unify some disparate objects by emphasizing their human-ness (the hands of the clock and the ribs of the umbrella, the skeleton key, the crowns of bubbles) and there's that almost too clever phrase "silt and cracked black pepper."

The bottom line when writing anything is that you want to be interesting. The problem with purple prose is that, most of the time, people find it boring. But, by making your details serve more than one role in the story, whether it reveals personality, social class, poetic artistry, or anything else, you'll keep the reader engaged because they will be constantly interacting with your book, focused on picking up all of the nuances you have put into it.

UN- Purple Prose, A Classic Example

Last week, Lady Glamis (who I've decided is also incredibly nice, and whose books I'd like to read) posted a valuable lesson on Purple Prose. When we write, we should avoid adding flowery details that don't serve any function other than giving details. One way to fix the problem of purple prose is to cut the extraneous information during revision. But, there are great examples when details, LOTS of them, don't end up sounding purple. This happens when the author makes use of the details not only to create a scene, but also to help reveal character, culture, status, and other aspects of the story. In this post, I'm looking at a classic example to show how the best details serve multiple functions. Keep in mind that I usually get criticized for not having enough details, so the fact that this works for me means that there is something in the description that is holding my attention. This is a passage from one of my favorite books -- sorry, but I'm Old School-- Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy:

Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparations for the ball had cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in that tulle dress and lace, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on top of it…

It was one of Kitty's best days. Her dress was not uncomfortable anywhere; her lace berthe did not droop anywhere; her rosettes were not crushed nor torn off; her pink slippers with high, hollowed-out heels did not pinch, but gladdened her feet; and the thick rolls of fair chignon kept up on her head as if they were her own hair. All the three buttons buttoned up without tearing on the long glove that covered her hand without concealing its lines. The black velvet of her locket nestled with special softness round her neck. That velvet was delicious; at home, looking at her neck in the looking-glass, Kitty had felt that that velvet was speaking. About all the rest there might be a doubt, but the velvet was delicious. Kitty smiled here too, at the ball, when she glanced at it in the glass. Her bare shoulders and arms gave Kitty a sense of chill marble, a feeling she particularly liked. Her eyes sparkled, and her rosy lips could not keep from smiling from the consciousness of her own attractiveness.

What I find amazing about this section is that I get completely overloaded with details but the writing still works for me. We know basically everything there is to know about Kitty's outfit as she is entering a ball. But, we also know a lot more. We know that Kitty has put a lot of time into this very eleborate gown. We know that she has a certain charm -- she knows how to wear this gown. She knows how to carry herself. She's probably been to balls like this dozens of times before, always elaborately dressed and trying to look her best. But, this is not a typical day. Because, we know, though her glamour may have come at the cost of her comfort in previous balls, today, everything is perfect. Her rosettes are not crushed or torn. Her slippers do not pinch. Tonight is a charmed night, and Tolstoy is able to really give us a feeling for just how perfect this night is by describing everything from her feet up to her hair, not missing a thing, to ensure us that, indeed, everything is perfect in its totality. And, then he goes on to describe even more details, this time dipping into the realm of things that most people probably wouldn't even consider. The gloves do not conceal the lines of her hands. The velvet is speaking! Her bare arms not only look like marble, but like chill marble. This is a girl that really cares about her appearance and the impression that she is going to make. (My belt rarely matches my shoes, on the other hand.) This entrance to the ball is something very important to Kitty's life. And, through the descriptions, we get a sense of who Kitty is: a young woman, just breaking into the social world. Her mind is not distracted by thoughts of peace and war, money, death. No. All she cares about at this moment is making a grand entrance. And, in that, we understand who she is at this moment in her life, completely, before she is forced to grow up.

So, while details can be boring, they can also be used to great effect when they reveal more than what is obvious. Tomorrow, I'll break down a more contemporary passage that I like, in the hopes of showing even more ways that details can be made interesting.