But wait. It's been three days and no one's posted. Your amazing RP is now apparently bust. You PM everyone and you get the same reply.
"I didn't really understand anything beyond the first paragraph..."
"Didn't wanna be rude, but can you redo the first post? It's really, really long and hard to understand. Oh, and what the hell does Liliputian mean?"
Confused, you search the first post. It has everything you want in a first post: explanatory, declamatory, and most importantly--
Oh. Wait. What does that word mean?
You dictionary.com it, then realise...
Why do you need dictionary.com for something you've written?
That's right, everybody. It's too fluffy.
What's fluff, you might ask? It's an informal slang term for "purple prose." Purple prose is, in simple terms, an overuse of description and useless florid words in a vain attempt to provide interest. Yes, dry, stripped-off stories are boring as well, but when you can't even understand the words you're reading, the story you might be going through (which might even have been brilliant up to that part) suddenly gets aggravating.
But why? Your English teachers might've told you that in essays, the longer and more descriptive you are, the better your marks.
For obvious reasons, test graders do not grade on how interesting a particular essay was. They're not being paid to read novellas, where interest and brevity are of the essence. They're being paid to get if you actually understood the works you had written the essay about. As such, in those cases, description to the little spots on the tiniest cricket is useful, and sometimes even rewarded. But not when roleplaying or writing pleasure stories.
The oft-mentioned premier example of the literary disease purple prose is the opening of Paul Clifford, a novel by Edward Bulwe-Lytton. It provides us with the following passage.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
This roleplayer finds that said quote can easily be condensed to, with little work, the following self-made arrangement:
In London, a dreadful storm racked the streets, raining heavily on the houses and almost putting out the streetlamps, until at points the wind took over and halted the downpour for moments, before the rain overpowered again.
Although I'm not a fan of putting forth my own dumbed-down renditions of classical literature, it is useful at times to use your own devices when doing things of this nature, because it shows how easily even a novice such as I can do it. Also, it's great practise for if you ever need to un-dye your purple prose.
(As a side note, there's a tongue-in-cheek award named after the aforementioned Edward Bulwe-Lytton that provides a $250 award for the writer who can come up with the worst, most violently violet first sentence to a purple-prose filled book.)
So you've realised that after you've learned a bit, you've been writing purple prose. What should you do about it?
Well, the worst you can do it do absolutely nothing about it. While for a while you might think, "Well, grammatical and punctuational problems are much larger than my purple prose!" But after a while you might notice... people aren't responding to your interest checks as avidly as they did before. Their posts aren't showing much inspiration. In OOC's, people are complaining about how the posts are becoming too big without adding new, useful information.
Finally, you might want to stop the purple prose. But how do you accomplish it?
First of all, you should identify problem parts in your posts where the words are getting out of hand. Perhaps you can try to find words that can explain what you're trying to say in a less verbose form but still explain your ideas effectively. Maybe that sentence about the condition of your character's foot could be cut out, seeing as how it doesn't really matter, nor will it be used as a bit of a Chekhov's gun (for starters, a Chekhov's gun is a detail that, for now, might be unimportant, but is used to greater effect in later sections of the RP or story.)
Second, you might want to try some writing competitions on RPG where the word count is limited. Sato (ViceVersus) has made some "songfic" contests that limit you to making a story less than 1300 words inspired by a song. Or maybe you might want to try something less avant-garde, just a personal experiment in reducing word count or minimizing extraneous information. One-shots are good for that kind of stuff; they remove the temptation of adding unnecessary details under the stipulation that they'll be used again later in the story... and never do.
(At this point I'll temporarily halt the guide to say one thing. There's a fine line between purple prose and good detailing of a crucial scene in a RP or story. Purple prose talks about the petunias in a flowerpot. Good detailing talks about the state of the corpse in the room that the flowerpot was in. Purple prose is unimportant. Good detailing helps the reader imagine a hard-to-imagine scene.)
Finally, you should use the ability to spot purple prose in your posts that you developed in the first step and the lessons you learned in writing brief vignettes in the second step in your RP and stories. Did you just write something that was completely unnecessary? Cut it out and possibly replace it with something that will contribute to the story. Did you just describe something that your character did in too much detail? Cut out the overly verbose part and replace it with something more brief. Hopefully people that you roleplay with will notice the difference, and even if they don't, you will.
Thanks for going through my really long thread! I should apply the first step to this thread too >>; I was a bit afraid it was a bit too big for a single post, but I think this type of presentation is better than having a billion posts about the topic.
Hope you enjoyed!
