Purple Prose
Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!
Don’t make it a movie.
A book is not a movie. (It’s better.) In movies, there’s lots of stage direction and boring dialogue. This is okay in movies because many things can happen at once quickly. In a movie, two people can enter a room, greet each other, pour coffee, sit down, and set a mood with their body language within a few seconds. Reading through all that in a book would take much longer. This slows everything down and makes it boring! No one wants to read a conversation like this:
“Hi, Dan!”
“Hi, Tim!”
“How’s it going?”
“Great, thanks for asking. How are you?”
“Doing well. How’s work?”
“Well . . . it’s going okay, I guess. Um, I don’t love the job, but it’s money.”
“Yeah, I get that. I feel the same way.”
That was SO BORING! And that didn’t even have any action beats or dialog tags in it to slow it down further. Cut all that down to a few sentences at most. We can assume they greet each other—just get to the good stuff.
Extra adverbs, adjectives, and syllables.
Using extra words to overly describe people, places, or things is annoying. We don’t need to know the short, bald, bearded, glasses-wearing man was strutting in a brown, corduroy jacket with brown matching pants and a striped, green tie with a black bowler hat. That’s just too many adjectives all at once. We don’t need to know that the woman angrily demanded a better discount on her enormous purchase while screaming loudly and tearfully at the employee.
Use fewer words to say the same thing. The woman screamed at the employee demanding a discount. Done. Same message. We lose the fact that she bought a ton of things, but that can likely be worked in elsewhere if it’s even important.
That’s the main thing to think about: Are these details even important? Does the reader really need to know what every single character looks like? Probably not.
To sum up
Revisit dialogue sections and cut anything unnecessary.
Use the fewest number of words possible to get the same message across.
Decide if all the details are actually necessary for the reader to know.
Readers are smart and can infer! You don’t need to spell everything out for them.
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