Pregnant Purple Prose

I once called a writer friend and got the following voicemail greeting: “Pardons begged, we are presently truant and prevented from undertaking dialog with callers at present. After the modulation, please recite your sobriquet and cellular digit-string to better enable us an opportunity to reciprocate the honor of this summons.”

The title of this article is actually redundant—pregnant, or purple, prose is a reference to narrative that is so densely packed with every possible metaphor, adjective, and thesauretical word (such as the word thesauretical) that it’s almost a chore to wade through. It’s usually a sign of an inexperienced writer. No, not an unintelligent one, just one making an early attempt at writing.

Ernest Hemingway coined the term iceberg writing (also called the theory of omission) which he summarized as: “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

This is a subtler form of the writing axiom show don’t tell. I had an editor with whom I had many heated discussions (or arguments, if you must) over the fact that he insisted I caption events in my manuscript that were, by my estimation, already obvious from the rest of the action. It was frustrating to me that he insist I spell out in bold italics, metaphorically speaking, things that I was convinced the reader could already discern from the existing narrative.

Hemingway is talking about the sense of authority a writer conveys by writing about true things in plain language, without the need to couch it in pregnant prose. He was the most vocal of many writers of his time (and since) propounding the plain writing movement, which held that writing in plain language conveys as much if not more authority, tension, and drama as narrative packed with $10 vocabulary and poetry-laden word-choices. Later, Hemingway made the point that plain did not mean simple. That narrative could be complex and dense with import without having to be heavy and stifling and unwieldy with over-explanation.

I encourage everyone to read Hemingway with this in mind to get a master class in the specifics of what this means. Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.