Overwritten, excessively ornate prose that draws attention to itself and away from the story it's supposed to be telling.
Purple prose is writing that tries too hard to be beautiful, impressive, or literary, and ends up calling attention to the writer rather than the story. It's characterized by excessive adjectives, overwrought metaphors, melodramatic emotion, and a general sense that the prose is performing rather than communicating. The name comes from a passage in the Roman poet Horace's 'Ars Poetica,' where he criticized writers who sewed 'purple patches' of flashy writing onto otherwise plain work.
Every writer produces purple prose sometimes - it's a natural stage of learning to write descriptively. Recognizing it is what matters. When you can spot the difference between prose that's genuinely beautiful and prose that's just showing off, you level up as both a writer and an editor. The fix is rarely to strip everything bare. It's to keep the beauty that serves the story and cut the beauty that only serves your ego.
This 1970 fantasy novella is legendary for lines like 'The aura of the nefarious fiend permeated the air.' It's become a beloved example of purple prose pushed to its extreme.
The opening of 'Paul Clifford' (1830) is so infamously overwritten that it inspired an annual bad writing contest - the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Often cited for passages where Edward's beauty is described in increasingly extravagant terms. Love it or not, it sparked real conversations about prose style in popular fiction.
Rich, vivid description is great. Purple prose is specifically description that's excessive, unfocused, or serving the writer's vanity instead of the reader's experience.
The fix for overwriting isn't no writing. It's precise writing. Keep the descriptions that do real work and cut the ones that are just decoration.
Purple prose is easy to spot when spoken. If you feel embarrassed reading a sentence out loud, that sentence is probably purple.
Write the most absurdly purple paragraph you can. Describe a character making breakfast using at least five adjectives per noun, three metaphors per sentence, and the most dramatic language possible. Make it ridiculous. Then rewrite the same scene in clean, effective prose. This exercise trains your ear to hear the difference between description that works and description that's performing.