Purple prose examples

[igenlode]

More rewrites, in response to some rather uninspired 'how to improve your purple prose' examples.

Original 'bad' (and pretty implausible) example:
He moved slowly, at length, and carefully on tip toes through the room with an entirely unnecessary gaze trained on the purple, wooden front door.

Suggested 'improved' version, which was then accused of being boring:
He moved carefully through the room, training his gaze on the door.

My attempt for that one:
He moved cautiously through the room, keeping a wary eye on the front door.

Second 'bad' example (which I can actually imagine appearing quite inoffensively in the middle of one of those first-person teenage books with a geeky narrator):
The proliferation of thoughts in my mind was causing me to experience brain freeze in the middle of science class.

Suggested 'improved' (and rather didactic) version:
My mind was crammed with too many thoughts, which is why I had a brain freeze moment in the middle of science class.

My attempt at making it more 'active':
My mind was buzzing as one possibility after another tumbled in and was rejected, and stuck there in the middle of science class I couldn't seem to get out a single coherent thought.

Comments

[sallymn]

.... I like your versions better than the suggested improved ones.

[igenlode]

The first one is better, I think -- although I'm still puzzled as to how the character is watching the front door from *inside* the house. Presumably I'm influenced by the fact that traditional English houses have the front door opening onto a hallway, and not directly into anything that would be described as a furnished 'room'!

I feel the second one is a bit over the top, but I was trying to anticipate possible objections...

[(Anonymous)]

I should finish typing that email to you, but instead I got all caught up scrolling through your blog. :P And I love these tiny rewrites!

The first one — hmmm... I must admit that the initial iteration was a bit much. It was thinking it's quite okay, but then the "entirely unnecessary gaze" came up, and the entirely unnecessary description of the door didn't do the text any favours either.

The second iteration of it feels all right to me. But I'm a minimalist, so... :)

But I think your version strikes just the right balance. I like it!

As for the second example, I appreciate a lot that you circumvented that "brain freeze". Haha! To me the term would always feel jarring in a story. I like a lot how you reworked that. :)

If you ever feel like playing around with rewrites, let me know. Any time. I can come up with an entire collection of fragments from which to choose. :D

Top of the list might be that awkward night without a moon or whatever alternative I might come up with at some point. XD

Do you by any chance have more purple prose rewrites anywhere on your blog? I'm quite curious to read more on the topic. I'm getting the feeling lately that my writing might be, at times, either too purple or too beige (Can one person have issues with both? Apparently, yes.) so I'd love to read more on the topic if you have anything posted here or stored and waiting to be posted.

Let me know. :)


Best,

Mei

[igenlode]

Saying "he moved at length through the room" in the first example doesn't even make sense :-(
(I mean, you could just about say "At length, he moved carefully through the room" in the sense of "eventually, after a long time", but even so it would be hard to come up with an example where that phrasing would sound natural -- and I don't think that was the sense intended here.)
The whole business of 'training his gaze', i.e. staring carefully and fixedly at something, doesn't make much sense either. If his gaze is trained on the front door all the time he would probably be tripping over everything in the room ;-P

---

Rewrites are under the tag edits -- created so that I could find them myself ;-)

And I've spent the evening caught up in scrolling through my blog myself, having now got back to 2019 ;-p
Anything rather than attempt to rewrite that wretched chapter...

[(Anonymous)]

"He moved at length" is not idiomatic, you say...?
It would have been nice to reply now with "Yeah, I thought that didn't sound quite right." But the truth is I can never spot these things.

[igenlode]

The only way I can usually spot something wrong in a foreign language is if it actively interferes with my comprehension (i.e. someone writes the equivalent of 'loose' for 'lose', and it's a word that is so obsolete or obscure, or simply inappropriate, that I get completely confused because I don't have the 'auto-correct' ability of a native speaker...)