I have found it infinitely befuddling that many derivative fan works of Hasbro's digitally animated slideshow featuring diminutive pastel-colored equines which abuse their written formats by compensating for creative malnourishment and inexperience by awkwardly tacking impressive-sounding vocabulary that may or may not be descriptive of the author-intended mental imagery onto benign nouns receive a far more agreeable reception among the fiber optically connected community of fans of said digitally animated slideshow than I believe is sufficiently warranted.

What I mean is, pony fanfics on fimfic that use purple prose tend to be overrated, in my opinion. See how annoying it is to try to read? How can people like this? It confuses the hell out of me.

It's all about taste, mate. Some would be infinitely befuddled by the amount of people who write stories about fictional horses. Some would be confused as to how you don't get down with the purple prose. To each their own.

5317895
What you wrote is alright. Some folks write like that and that's okay.

I've seen purple prose that almost goes indigo.
As long as I don't have to write like that, I'm fine.

5317895

Woah, woah, woah, woah...

First off, if you use bad purple, then yes, it sucks. So let me get that for you.

"I have found it infinitely befuddling that many derivative fan works of Hasbro's digitally animated slideshow featuring diminutive pastel-colored equines which abuse their written formats, by compensating for creative malnourishment and inexperience by awkwardly tacking impressive-sounding vocabulary onto otherwise benign nouns, that may or may not be adequately descriptive of the author-intended mental imagery, onto benign nouns receive a far more agreeable reception among the fiber optically connected community of fans of said digitally animated slideshow than I believe is sufficiently warranted."

Much better. Altogether it says the same thing, and is still a mouthful, but better phrasing means it's now divided into digestible segments.

So people will love your work if it's mostly simplified?

5318209

That's what both Anton Chekhov and Ernest Hemingway said.

5318229 I'll keep that in mind.

What you're looking for is what is called in the writing industry "strong writing". It has many traits but for description it's primarily about using strong nouns and verbs supplemented by the barest of exact and vivid adjectives and adverbs. A powerful bonus if you relate descriptions symbolically with the mood of the scene. But strong writing is also tight writing. (This is agreed upon by thousands of professional authors, publishers, and literary agents in every single genre of fiction. This means it's probably worth paying attention to.)

The story is about objects (nouns) and the actions/reactions (verbs). This differs from poetry which aims to paint pictures. The things people remember about stories are events (it's a story after all).

"Bad purple" comes into play when a writer attempts to put too much emphasis on too many complex words of all types and misses out on strong, tight exactness. It comes off as a boring, scientific paper approach that ends up detaching the reader rather than engaging by the power of relevance.

So the goal is exact and vivid by the shortest (tightest) route. Sometimes this means finding a more specific word that can eliminate a whole phrase or sentence. Sometimes it means using something simple or even widely acceptable slang.

You can't control what audience reads what you have. And you will come across the occasional dull reader who should be entertained irregardless regardless of how poorly story is written if it involves what they are looking for. And you also have that group of English elitists who think the only important thing is the vocabulary and are ignorant of execution. But for the rest, you have to snatch attention and keep it in a world that has less and less patience for reading.

-- Chopsticks

Personally, I favor a slightly more flowery and poetry-like style of writing more than a "straight to the point, no BS" style, both in my own writing and in my reading, though I will agree that sitting with a thesaurus open and picking out bigger words and phrases just to make your story sound better isn't really going to help the quality of it.

Writing is just like any other art form, and a line that I've always liked (and used myself on a number of occasions) is "I may not know art, but I know what I like". This perhaps goes doubly for fan fiction, since on this site alone you can go from very short adult stories that cut to the chase so quickly and abruptly that you feel like you walked into the room just in time to get splashed with something sticky, to long-winded epics that take hundreds of thousands of words to play out and feel very much like a fantasy novel.

I guess I'll wrap up by saying that what you're asking is a matter of taste, and that if you don't like the more wordy stories, dun read 'em. :D