I’ve had my share of lovely, soft thoughts. Often, they occur while out for a summer walk. Rarely do they occur while driving. Sometimes I capture them well with words, and sometimes I bloat them out like a dead animal that had once been a thing of beauty but is now toe-up causing everyone to rush past it as quickly as possible since it stinks.
Purple prose, then.
The skip-over parts, the chunks of words that get in the way of the message. The beautiful sunset bludgeoned to death with too many adverbs and tears. The incredible taut thriller brought to a screeching halt by the author’s insistence we know the heroine had a full, pouty mouth that the hero would like to do nasty things to when all we want is the murder and clues.
Years ago, while working at a startup, I came across author Jeff Goins for something related to content marketing. I can’t remember the details, and that’s probably just God being kind because startup culture is a meatgrinder.
Anyway, while frantically downloading my Kindle books from Amazon before the February 26, 2025 cutoff date when they no longer would allow such a thing to happen because we continue our march towards owning nothing but subscribing and licensing everything, I came across a Goins book I’d gotten for free. Most of my Kindle library was full of free books I’d never read but couldn’t stop myself from grabbing. Wilkie Collins, Chesterton, everything Tolkien had ever put a pen to, and a collection of Dan Ariely’s books on irrationality because I have an irrational fixation on Ariely.
I went to Goins’ website, poked around, felt sufficiently lackluster in my own career, and then began reading some articles.
Like this one:
I wake up to birdsong and soft light washing in through a window that no curtain can cover. I drink coffee and read a book, easing into the day. Work starts with an interview. A woman interrupts at just the right time. Doorbell rings, dog barks, life continues. She wants to mow my lawn in exchange for the ability to pay a bill. I say yes and go back to work. The children play upstairs and I try to focus.
The article is much longer, so go ahead and click through and read it; I won’t lift all of his copy and deny him some traffic.
Goins is a much better writer than I am, though the passive voice in his blog post feels odd and removed, as if he experienced his day in an unholy out-of-body experience, which reminds me of several phone calls to Dell computer tech help in the WindowsXP days. Any time I encounter a strangeness in writing, I’m reminded of the author Carol Goodman, who writes in the present tense and how off-putting that is for about three pages until her books pull you in.
But back to Goins and the color purple (which is Alice Walker’s masterpiece, not Goins’). Had I written such an article about my day, and my thoughts on living a small life (the latter of which I do, actually, write about quite a bit), it would have looked like this:
I wake up after hitting snooze the second time. There’s not much light; my room is in the basement, and the window well keeps out pretty much everything except headlights down the street and lightning. I don’t know why I set my alarm anymore, really, since I work for myself and no one cares when I wake up and, depending on my mood, I wonder if they care if I do wake up at all. But I know the importance of boundary events and habit and routine, so I get out of bed knowing the day before, I lost a freelance client I’d been counting on and would have to find a way to make today onward okay.
My feet hit the floor and I remember again the fast pace at which my arches are collapsing. I make my bed because if I die today, there’s no way I want people to think I was a slob, assuming they’ll understand the reasoning behind a pile of clean clothes and the pile of mildly dirty clothes I can still wear a few more times, and the clothes draped over the hamper that are mostly ready to wash but could be used in a pinch. I hopped on the scale because sometimes changes require data, threw water on my face, slogged upstairs, turned on the electric kettle, and waited.
Tea? Hot chocolate? A bowl of Grape Nuts cereal? I'm not sure. I do some one-leg lifts and balancing exercises while the kettle heats up because you lose your balance when you get old, and I want to delay that as much as I can, so a little balance exercise each day must surely help.
Eventually, I make my way to my basement office, wake up the computer, sigh as my eyes almost shutter at the glare, and start with spreadsheets. Then I tackle some virtual assistant stuff for a client, playing YouTube videos in the background so I can hear a person’s voice and not feel so alone in the silent house. I began writing blog posts for my own website since client work had faded. I might as well schedule out a few months for readers. I ask God to bring some paying subscribers to my digital doorstep. The cat comes into my office, complaining about his life. I think God must feel that way about me and my whining sometimes. In a bit, I’m feeling pretty good. My FitBit tells me I ought to move, and I agree, so I do. Pretty soon it’s five, and I stop for the day and head upstairs to make supper.
That’s just me, mind you.
I’m less and less able to read the precious take on things, and I am annoyed when, upon reviewing past writing, I realize I’ve done that to readers. I’m even more annoyed when I acknowledge I still will do that readers. Preciousness lurks unbecomingly in my future. I want to find a way to communicate reality and clarity with meaning. I like Billy Collins’ poetry because he does this with few words and maximum impact.
Life is precious, but I’m better able to see it if I don’t make everything in it precious. Perhaps daily things seem more precious when you’re in your 20s and early 30s when you’re looking for deep meaning in sunlight hitting your drinking glass and bursting into rainbows, or having a rare day where whatever is flowing through your veins is pure joy and energy because you still believe there’s room to have the lingering thought of what you might be when you “grow up” and still might qualify for 40-under-40 lists.
This is especially so, this bloating of the basics, if you’re struggling to find things to write and have not had the joy of a retail or food service job in which customers give you plenty to write about for years and years to come. Vibrant prose easily becomes eye-scorching, mind-numbing prose.
I do get frustrated by the number of new or young writers on this Substack platform who bemoan the difficulty of getting started, of knowing what to write, begging for likes and follows and understanding, of the preciousness of everything all wrapped in purple prose, trying to find deep existential meanings in simple days, and of trying to force some kind of ephemeral branding into their lives without overtly doing so. I’ve learned that the meaty existential is not usually found with a microscope and prolonged examination that lends itself to repetitive descriptions from every possible angle, but instead, tripping over it in a sentence or less.
I remember learning about prepositional phrases in school, and how we were to visualize a box and then describe all the ways you could be in relation to a box. In it, on it, around it—interestingly, many of Steven Segal’s movies have prepositional phrase titles which is highly distracting to me for some reason—but the technique for finding prepositions is probably not best applied to search out deep meanings.
How many ways can I overthink the bird that slammed into my window? Is it a symbol of my life? My career? Is it a message from God? What I ought to make for supper?
I’m probably frustrated by the sense that someone is milking a moment for too much preciousness because I already abused that tendency before, in my 20s and 30s. Writers seem to need to find the courage to start the car before weighing it down by dressing it up like a parade float before finding the gas pedal and getting it up to speed so the ribbons and balloons fall away.
Best advice?
Just try the Grape Nuts cereal. It’s pretty good. That’s really all I was here to tell you.