For those of you who don't know who the Purple Prosers are, you probably weren't a roleplayer ten years ago. I first encountered them a few years after I started roleplaying in AOL chatrooms. I joined during the heyday for chat rp, where people would actually play in the public rooms instead of just standing around making a fuss or talking about nothing. There was one room in particular everyone went to find someone new to play with, simply known as the Tavern. This was the first room the Purple Prosers hijacked.
Always writing in purple (for whatever reason, not like they would tell you) these people would flaunt their expansive vocabularies, or at least work the heck out of dictionary.com. What would take you or I ten words to get across, they had to do it in twenty-five. It wasn't good enough to say 'She made her way to the bar', they had to say 'Delicately placing one pedicured foot in front of the other, she silently sauntered between the other patrons through the slumberous, smokey tavern to reach the sticky walnut bar.' And that's putting it lightly.
They became annoying to the regulars for two reasons: Their expansive posts would instantly flood the screens and knock anyone else's posts off into oblivion before anyone could reply, and they would often refuse to play with anyone who couldn't match their post length. Character doesn't have anything to say or do in your post? Well, start talking about other useless things or else you're getting the boot. Where these people came from or what they were thinking I don't know. Where they wound up, well, I can tell you one thing: They're not writers.
Writing isn't an exercise in showing off your vocabulary. You're trying to tell a story efficiently and accurately to your reader. You can't do this if they're getting bored by your three paragraphs on how your character eats soup. What's more, Purple Prosers very often used words that would have some of the most well-read people scratching their heads. Long descriptions or not, if you're using words that the general populace don't recognize, then they're not going to want to read your book. No one likes to feel stupid. This is why normal people don't read legal documents, or medical textbooks.
This is the reason why I tend to hate those 'Word of the Day' apps. When are you ever going to use those words? And when is anyone going to know what you're talking about when you do? Now, I'm not saying we dumb down everything we say and use only the most basic words in what we write. There are a lot of rarely-used words that people easily recognize in context. But if you're making your readers pull out a dictionary in order to read your book, there's a problem.
One of the main reasons the Purple Prosers will never be writers, big words aside, is the word count. Giant books are not uncommon or unliked anymore; Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, they're all huge books that people are devouring. The difference between J.K. Rowling and a Purple Proser, however, is that Harry Potter isn't a thousand pages because she's using twenty words when she only needs five. She genuinely has a long story to tell and she does so efficiently. It's because of that efficiency that people read it. The pace of the story moves quickly, and the things she does sit and describe are things we enjoy reading about, such as the Quidditch games.
So, people, please. You may genuinely have a large, expansive vocabulary that makes you great at Scrabble. But read a few lines of your novel to your friends; if they sit there and stare blankly at you, you've got a very Purple problem that may hold you back in your writing career.
