Walking a Tightrope Over a Field of Purple Prose ( Bite Sized Method)

As I work to expand my writing style in a new direction, I’m slower to pull out the paring knife and lean everything down than I used to be. But man is it hard to resist that urge? Following the advice of minimalists like Chuck Palahniuk, I’ve spent years training myself to be efficient on every paragraph that could afford to lose a few kilos and every sentence that could lose an adverb or two. Anyone who’s read my work may baulk at this claim, but it’s true. For the entire life of this Substack page I’ve been making concerted efforts to reduce the distance between the start line and finish line of anything I write. While I’m far from mastery on the minimalist front, I feel I’ve sufficiently drilled those shorthand instincts to trust I’ll be able to call on them when required down the line. Though I’ll never throw away the paring knife entirely, for now I’ve swallowed enough of the Hemingway ethos to let the natural maximalist in me breath.

The trick is to avoid inhaling too much.

This is not to say that I haven’t been well served by taking a direct approach to language. My early writing used to consist of sprawling Ayn Rand-esque monologues. My work has improved drastically simply by resisting my tendency to sprawl and once I’ve reached my editing phase, proceeding to take a scalpel to my best attempt at a “reserved” first draft.

Learning to utilize subtext has been an asset for me in this. But subtext wears on lean writing. It puts pressure on it. Often asking your sparse sentences to do more work than their emaciated bodies are built for. If you don’t leave some fat on the chop, at a certain point those malnourished sentences are going to give in to the hunger and start taking secret trips to the McDonalds drive through. Before you know it, your writing will have a pot belly and your paragraphs will be bloated in ways that don’t even make sense.

So I’m letting the maximalist breath a bit. Not because I think longer, complicated sentences are “better” or more sophisticated. I’m doing it because this is where my natural tendencies lie. As an amateur, it served me well to turn my back on those tendencies. What’s worse than clunky writing? Clunky writing that goes on for too long.

Now I’ve got a firmer grip on the reins of my own prose however, it makes sense to expand the toolkit (with heavy doses of reserve of course). I’m embracing the urge to sprawl, but only when it makes sense to do that.

I recently opened a short story with the following sentence:

Every trip to the supermarket with her is a run on sentence that should have ended six words back, two isles back, but the momentum has continued to roll like unoiled trolley wheels moving us forward in a way that I wouldn’t describe as painful though certainly wouldn’t call joyful as I silently crunch my shoulders up to my neck in the frozen food section, too fed up to continue standing next to her while she inspects fourteen soy sauce labels, turning, rolling, reading, out of my eyeline but not out of earshot, the low mutter of sugar content under her breath as I try not to think about the kick off whistle that I allowed an extra forty minutes for and am now doubting will be long enough.

Yea I know, the post-modern voice is dripping off this opening in a bit of a gross way, but it serves my point. This long sentence is an indulgence that serves an indulgent narrator. It echoes the sensation of waiting for something that’s taking longer than it should while simultaneously signalling this narrator is a bit of a cunt. There are wrinkles contained in this sentence that a minimalist approach wouldn’t let me explore. So it’s nice to expand the toolkit a bit.

While not every sentence I write is as bulky as the example above, my recent embrace of maximalism has led me to fill out my scenes with richer imagery and description than I used before—which admittedly slows things down. But if you get the rhythm right, the leanness balances the bulk and you can find an equilibrium that works.

Now that I’m no longer seeing minimalism as the alter to pray on, I’ve given myself license to be more flamboyant with my word choices.

The Dangers of “Fancy” Writing

Of course it’s not lost on me that I’m walking a fine line here. Some of you may be reading this and cringing. Please don’t go down that road. Please don’t go and get all “experimental.”

Relax. I know what I’m doing. I understand that Rush isn’t a better band than AC/DC just because they know how to modulate between modes. There’s method to this.

For the unpractised writer, flashy language is dangerous territory. The looming prospect of purple prose starts to sniff the air and sense it might have a new victim to feed on.

If you haven’t heard this term before, “purple prose” refers to those flowery, sugar scented sentences that have more topping than filling. But not in a nice way. They’re the sentence equivalent of the hardcover doodles on a thirteen year old girl’s diary. They attempt to make a scene more poetic but usually end up leaving the reader with a furrowed brow and a bit of a headache trying to work out what the fuck they’re meant to be visualising.

i.e.

The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

It feels sacrilegious to use an example from McCarthy here when I could have taken the low hanging fruit of Twilight or any pick of best selling romances. But I think its a stronger choice to highlight a good writer missing the mark (or perhaps shooting for different goals than the standard reading experience).

These sentences certainly invoke the biblical ambience that is a signature of Mccarthy’s writing, but if tasked to draw clear images from these descriptions, a reader has to do some heavy mental lifting here which borders on counterproductive as far as the reading experience is concerned.

That’s the bad, but with the right eye and deliberate restraint however, maximalism can be weaponised to great effect and make the sentence level reading experience much richer than its minimalist counterparts.

Here’s another Mccarthy example:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

Here the images are razor sharp. The sprawling sentence—which I think actually contains less punctuation in the original than the above example I found on the internet— benefits from its length, mimicking a terror stricken witness seeing this scene for the first time. Minimalists would slap you across the knuckles for trying to pull something like this off.

Before I wrap this up, I’ll acknowledge that for the topic matter I tend to tackle in my writing, a shift into maximalism might seem like a bit of a contradiction. I tend to write reserved, stoic characters. Wouldn’t these be better complimented by spare, short sentences?

There’s almost a point here. But to assume your prose needs to structurally reflect the pared down characters it’s describing is a first semester way of looking at language. By bottoming out on dialogue and interiority, it leaves room for rich language and setting to carry a greater share of the weight. While no one sticks the landing one hundred percent of the time, I dare you to read any Cormac McCarthy novel and to argue with me on this point.