Descriptions: Purple vs. Beige Prose and Scenery
This being Part 2 of my description showcase. Part 1 (the Basics) can be found here.
I see purple and beige prose mostly in descriptions of scenery, so I’m going to describe the picture of this mountain next to the lake (x).
Beige prose is the bare-bones description of something. It doesn’t use a lot of adjectives, the adjectives used are basic, and the sentence structure is fairly simple. This is a beige prose description:
The mountain rose high over the still lake. The mountain was grey with green trees growing on it. Its colors were reflected in the lake. Birds flew over the lake. The morning sunlight lit the mountain’s side like a lamp, but did not touch the water. The lake water was mostly blue. The shores were rocky.
Dullness – The above sentence is a very boring read. It doesn’t have any variety whatsoever. It tells you what happens and that’s about it.
Vagueness – “Birds flew over the lake”; what birds? “Green trees”; what kinds of trees? There are also twenty thousand different shades of blue that could pass as lake water blue. Are we talking Marine Blue, Dark Royal Blue, or Midnight Navy? Also, if the lake is mostly blue, what other colors are in it?
Understandable – beige prose tells it like it is. You know that there is a lake with a rocky shore adjacent to a mountain with trees and that’s all you really need to picture the scene.
Concise – It’s 56 words long and conveys the full picture of the lake and the mountain. You can’t get much more concise than that.
Purple prose is at the other end of the scale as beige prose. Purple prose is characterized by long, complex sentences, and the liberal usage of polysyllabic adjectives.
The mountain clawed upward like an unctuous parvenu, reaching towards the dove grey sky with its proud peak. Its sheer face bare save for where the gentleness of slope allowed lustrous evergreens to take root in the meager soil. The mountain was a palimpsest of eons of erosion, seasons, and other such orthographical changes. Pale white sunlight bathed the mountainside where the clouds allowed it, giving the mountain an air of mystical beauty. Reflecting the entirety of this glorious scene was the lake yawning at the mountain’s feet. The sapphire water was still in the biting, frigid morning air, the only movement on its surface coming from the reflections of robins as they flitted over it, singing their melodious aubades. Perhaps the only other quantifiable movement was at its rocky shores, where the water gently stroked at the boulders scattered helter-skelter like a child’s toys.
I need to go wash my hands.
discoholicmusic
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
