An Idiot's Guide to Line Editing

Chapter Fifteen -- I vomited gouts of purple prose from my writing implement

Have you read Irene Iddesleigh by Amanda McKittrick Ros? You should, it's amazing. I found it through the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. It's very short, you can read it in a couple of evenings, and I did, and I laughed a lot. Irene Iddesleigh is one of the worst books ever written, and this is because its prose isn't so much as purple, but ultraviolet. It's incredible. It's in the public domain, so you can download a pdf or whatever.

For this chapter I'm going to show a few different types of excessive writing, and we can talk about what to do to fix. I don't think you're going to learn anything from this, I just did it for completeness, so you can relax and take it easy. Before we start, can I show you the drinks menu?

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The easiest are these! They are exclamation marks! They sound excited! And breathless! And if you use too many they are really irritating! Especially all at once!!!

I think that's quite enough of that.

Generally, you should use them very, very sparingly. The old adage is to have one per book, and that's obviously stupid because it implies that there is some magical threshold which will cause everything to explode if you exceed it: but as a sort of rough rule of thumb I can see why people say that.

I think you should only ever use them in reported speech or thoughts. When a narrative voice is shouting at you, like I was above, it's exhausting. And then, if your characters are shouting at each other all the time, well, that's exhausting too... But sometimes it makes sense for them to shout because the building is collapsing around them. However, maybe they don't need to use exclamation marks to show that unless they are really screaming. You can use 'she shouted' speech tags, instead. Or whatever.

Look, this is easy, you get the idea. You don't need me to tell you about this. This was really just an amuse bouche before the starter. Water for the table?

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With your bouche well and truly amused, let's move onto our appetiser, which is over-emphasis words. Again, these are obvious.

Leonard picked up the massive slice of cheese. It was extremely pungent and hugely mouldy.

'Mon dieu,' he said, in his very best chef's accent. 'Sacre bleu. Blimey, this stinks...'

This was going into truly the finest cheese cake that Swindon had ever seen.

'Massive', 'extremely', 'very', 'hugely', 'truly', 'finest'... My writing style gets in the way of the problem here: going over-the-top can be used ironically. If this reads like I'm poking fun at poor old Leonard, well, I want you to know that this is deathly serious because he's making a cheese cake to save Swindon from aliens who eat people alive. Yeah, that wiped the smirk from your face, didn't it?

The obvious problem with using superlatives like this is that you run out of road very quickly. If this camembert is extremely pungent, how do I describe the gorgonzola that's been left in a cupboard since 1986?

The less obvious problem is what I call subjectivity. I mentioned it in the adjectives chapter, if you remember. Essentially, when we use words like 'massive' we're putting a subjective spin on it: maybe I the writer think it's huge, but you've worked in the brie mines of Wales and thrown away smaller pieces of cheese, and you would be really unimpressed with this puny chunk of fromage.

Then of course 'very' is a nasty little word. It's almost always replaceable or removable. It's kind of the opposite of hedging: you're over-adding certainty rather than under-adding it.