Beige prose is a writing style that favors brevity and simplicity. Writers of beige prose use:
Plain words: Beige prose calls for common words that will be easily understood by readers, and it often favors shorter words over longer ones.
Simple structure: The structure of beige sentences is most often simple—meaning that the sentences follow simple “subject, verb, object” construction without any additional clauses included with commas.
Minimal description: Beige prose favors straightforward and brief description rather than extensive metaphors, qualifiers, or long lists of adjectives or adverbs.
Example of Beige Prose
Though Ernest Hemingway is often cited for his beige prose, Mark Twain was also a master of using language efficiently. Consider this passage from his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
We went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back toward the end of the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still.
Most of this paragraph is written in simple sentence structure, with few adjectives and adverbs. Twain could have described the house or more about the path, but he chose to keep the structure simple to clearly convey the action happening, which is more crucial to the story.
When to Use Beige Prose
Beige prose can be a useful tool in plenty of writing situations:
During action sequences: Short sentences and minimal description will focus readers’ attention on the action and avoid slowing down the pace.
For setting: It’s easy to go overboard when describing a setting—but beige prose is a great way to keep your descriptions from becoming overwhelming. If you say “The cabin room was sparse except for the looming stuffed grizzly in the corner,” readers can fill in the details for themselves without you needing to describe the floorboards, the window, the bedsheets, and what your character had for dinner last week.
For character descriptions: Character descriptions benefit from beige prose much the same way as setting descriptions—if you choose one or two interesting details to mention, then readers will fill in the rest and remember each character better than if you had an entire paragraph describing each one.
When to Avoid Using Beige Prose
Relying too much on beige prose can make your writing feel drab and unfeeling. Here are a few times when you should think about amping up the description:
When you want to inspire emotion: Beige prose often comes across as a series of terse statements, and that will work against you if you’re trying to inspire a specific emotion in readers. During particularly poignant scenes, feel free to add in some strong description to describe how your characters are feeling.
When writing dialogue: While beige prose can sound like the way certain people talk in real life, it’s definitely not true for everyone. If you have a specific character who you want to be a chit-chatter, don’t write them using only terse replies just for the sake of beige—it will sacrifice their character development.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Beige Prose
Beige prose is a tool that allows writers to draw readers’ attention to the right things, helping them zero in on the important part of a passage rather than bogging them down in excessive description and unnecessary words.
However, if a writer overuses beige prose, the writing can come across as terse or brusque, and readers can quickly get bored.
Purple Prose
Purple Prose - a pejorative term that describes prose writing that overemphasizes showy descriptive language.
In the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, purple prose is “prose that is too elaborate or ornate.”
If you find that a passage in your own writing only draws attention to your prodigious vocabulary, or that it exists primarily to boost word count, you may be guilty of using purple prose—or at the very least “purple patches” of prose.
Differences between Beige Prose & Purple Prose
Purple prose is the opposite of beige prose, but it is more than just description—purple prose is writing that goes over the top. The differences between beige prose and purple prose are in:
Word choice: While beige prose opts for plain and common words, purple prose sounds as if the writer looked up synonyms and antonyms in a thesaurus to sound impressive. It is often described as flowery language and goes overboard with figures of speech.
Sentence structure: While beige prose uses simple sentences as much as possible, it’s rare to find a simple sentence in purple prose—purple prose is all about piling on clause after clause of description with no variation.
Word count: While beige prose avoids unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, purple prose uses as many as possible, often describing things that are obvious or that aren’t important to the plot.
Example of Beige Prose vs. Purple Prose
While beige prose can be a tool writers use for a particular effect, purple prose declined in popularity in the twentieth century and is now rarely thought of as a sign of good writing—it should be avoided. The below example illustrates why.
First, consider this example of purple prose:
He took up the instrument of cleaning in his left hand, grasping the handle in his fist and moving the brush end in laggard, slothful fashion across his ivory mounds of mastication. In the reflected image of the looking glass, he observed his fatigued visage, the corrugations and depressions in his epidermal layer communicating the information: He was far-removed from the days of juvenescence.
See how it substitutes common words for thesaurus versions and short ideas for long ones, almost as if it’s deliberately trying to reach an inflated word count? That’s what purple prose is all about—sacrificing clarity for an over-the-top language that feels like it’s trying too hard to impress.
Now take a look at this version of the same example. It’s beige, but it still features some effective description:
He brushed his teeth, watching his tired, wrinkled face in the mirror. He was getting old.
In this version, readers can clearly understand what’s going on, and the few, focused descriptive words (“tired,” “wrinkled”) help them get the tone of the action without going overboard.
Writers: does your prose lean toward more beige or purple?
Strongly beige
Leaning beige
Leaning purple
Strongly purple
It varies depending on what exactly I’m working on, can be beige or purple
Other (explain in notes)
See results / I don’t write / vanilla
Voting ended onFeb 17, 2025
*Beige means very stark, straightforward, efficient, blunt prose while purple means more metaphorical, lyrical, flowery, and ornate prose.
These terms can be used as insults, but they can also just be helpful ways of describing writing styles. Earnest Hemingway famously gave very beige prose, where someone like Sylvia Plath wrote in a more purple style. Both styles can be done well or badly.
I think we all have a general consensus on Purple prose, but what do you think of Beige, or its more extreme cousin, Infrared prose?
I’ve never seen the term infrared prose before, though I can kind of guess what you mean.
I will start this with the disclaimer that I tend towards more minimalist writing. I’m not Hemingway, but I’m more in that direction than in the opposite one. So I’m obviously a bit predisposed towards that sort of writing.
I think that there’s a time and a place for everything. A lot of advice is given about synonyms for said or showing instead of telling or all sorts of things, and I think it’s easy to run into the problem of feeling like everything needs to be described and elaborated on. Sometimes simple is better.
The problem that you run into with beige prose is when everything is pared down and simple. At that point it becomes boring and difficult to visualize. It’s important to find balance and figure out what needs to be simple and what needs more description.
Here’s a general breakdown I tend to use (and again, this is a suggestion rather than a rule, even for how I write, and it may not work for your style of writing, and that’s fine):
Simple:
Dialogue tags when the characters aren’t doing anything new/important.
Actions that don’t need explanation (eg. they sat, they stood, she laughed, while chatting they started walking down the hallway)
Stark counterpoints to descriptive language
Unimportant parts of character appearances
Observations UNLESS THE CHARACTER IS SPECIFICALLY OBSERVANT
Fast-paced narration
Descriptive:
Emotional thoughts/actions/description
Plot-important details
Magical, fantastical, scientific, or historical elements that wouldn’t make sense without description
Narration mean to evoke a slower/longer feeling
Anywhere you want to elicit a certain image that requires detail
Some of this is just what you get a feel of while writing. Some of my stories are much more descriptive than others. Some stories or scenes lend themselves better to descriptive language than others.
tried to google “beige prose” because I didn’t know what it meant and it autocorrected to beige pride. not sure what that means but it’s gotta mean something.
Her name was Violet.
In her daydreams she had eyes tinged with the purple breath of a settling dusk, and when another gaze happened to be swept under hers they would drown in her bubbling depths.
As it was, she could hardly hold a glance without flinching. She bumbled, blurted things out that she would immediately regret, and then compulsively say the same thing again.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Oh, hi, um, much ado about nothing, really?”
“Sorry, what was that?”
“Much, much ado about, um, oh…”
And then she would rub her thumbs together until they lost interest, and went away.
On good days, she would be able to avoid embarrassing herself when she didn’t happen to make a tangential joke.
On better days, she would be at home, without schoolwork or dithering social situations. She had a wooden bench up on the roofdeck of her house, where she could look down on neighborhood around her.
Violet didn’t have to worry about what she wore at home, either. She just donned whichever sando and shorts happened to be on top of her pile, grabbed a book and a bottle of chilled water, and made her way upstairs. The heat was sweltering, but her bench was under good shade, and there were stray breezes that tickled her skin.
That was the better kind of day. She wanted to think that the best day of her life had not yet come, and she was willing to give it the benefit of doubt until her very last day on earth.
That was just how it was.
I honestly think purple prose is worse than beige prose.
at least with beige prose, you can tell what’s going on and don’t feel like you’re wading through prose and don’t have to constantly refer to a dictionary just to figure out what the heck is happening.
Horace Goes Fishing (A False Study in Beige Prose)
Horace looked at the clock. Its hour hand was at seven; its minute hand at four. He squinted to ascertain the position of the second hand. However, the clock had no third hand and was content in giving Horace solely the hour and minute. Horace looked out the window. The sun was out. It was most probably seven o'clock in the morning. It was time to go out and fish.
Horace readied his rod and lures after putting on the appropriate fishing attire. He opened the door, stepped out, then locked it. He left, supplies in hand and knapsack. Indeed, he brought one. There was simply no time to inform the readers.
The sea was too far; Horace settled for a nearby river. It would probably have some fish. At his destination, Horace peeked into the water. He leaned too far forward and tripped on a rock. It hurt his rear when he crashed. He got back up and picked up his rod. Horace attached a worm to the tip of his fishing implement. He believed that worms were the most popular delicacies among fishkin. Assumptions might be dangerous things to make, but he could not simply ask.
It was Horace's first time to fish. There was, however, no reason for him to worry. He did not have breakfast yet. For sure he had motivation enough to catch some fish. Time had passed; it was already nine o'clock. Since the sun was out, it is most likely still morning, Horace thought to himself. Brunch would be an acceptable option.
With two hands, Horace grabbed his rod. He cast it into the river. He waited for five minutes. Ten. Thirty. Four hundred. He found nothing. His stomach growled like a beast in the night. A hungry beast with fangs and fur. It was probably a wolf. Horace's stomach was like a wolf. With his wolfish stomach, Horace left.
It was getting dark. Horace had arrived back home; the door was opened. He decided to sit down on his couch. He dozed off. When he woke up five minutes later, he realized something. His door was open before he got in.
How? I’m sure I’d locked the door, Horace assured himself weakly.
Horace woke up. He was yelled at by his employer.
It was all a dream!
The best stories often end this way. Congratulations! You can move on to the next stage!
