Synesthesia
Unlearning the so-called sin of purple prose, the power of a bright pink wall & reading letters as colorful patterns
Vol. 1, Issue 2
When I was 20, I took a writing class with a prominent journalist. Early in the semester, the teacher asked us to produce a short article that included a particular color in some way, and my assigned hue was yellow. I stacked image after image of lemony metaphors and big ol’ rays of sunshiny details, and by the end, I was somewhat proud of that little swatch of maximum yellow text. But when my teacher gave back my draft, it was extensively marked up with cross-outs and corrections. In the margins, the teacher wrote purple prose, which was my first introduction to the term: language that is too vivid, too flowery, too rich, too colorful to be used in serious, professional contexts. Purple prose draws attention to itself at the expense of the subject at hand. Purple prose demands to be seen, heard, experienced, noticed, admired. Purple prose is wrong. The assignment was a trick; we were supposed to learn how to use colorful descriptions, but not to overdo it.
Looking back, my little yellow story was probably not especially clever or effective. It undoubtably needed a heavy dose of ink from my teacher, but at the time, as I stared at the red circles and hash marks, blood rushed in my ears. And underneath that roar, a whisper: my writing voice was too much, too loud, too … not quite right. And so from then until graduation, with great effort and diligence, I practiced writing less, less, less, until my work sounded like a perfect carbon copy of a journalism textbook. Noun, verb, direct object — keep it simple, keep it tight, keep it flat. Add color in small doses only.
Mastering journalistic style helped me land copywriting jobs after college, but there was a cost. My creative work was hindered in ways I wouldn’t recognize for almost a decade. The crisp, clean lines of corporate copy made for stories drier than burnt toast, and I was so preoccupied with perfection that I couldn’t let my sentences get messy enough to morph into something new and complicated. In my head, words roiled and stormed and cried out, but on the page, I was tidy, efficient, and spare. Too spare. I’d cut my voice down to a mere stump of the sprawling wildness I’d once imagined it could be.
Six years ago, I stopped working in cubicles and began the long road of rehabilitating and rediscovering my own writing style. And in the process, I’ve discovered a particular penchant for the violaceous. I’m not yet the writer I want to be, far from it, but like a gardener tending seeds, I’m hopeful that with quiet diligence, I will eventually sprout something odd and special, like a yellow lady-slipper orchid.
Maybe you, too, are in a moment of creative rediscovery after a long period of feeling blocked or stifled. Maybe you’re struggling to let blossom the voice that has always been there, if only it could get a little dirt, a little sunshine, a little purple rain. If so, I hope today’s newsletter offers something that helps.
Listen
In honor of my long-lost yellow story, I suggest this as today’s soundtrack:
Read
Paul Smith’s Pink Wall: It Costs $60,000 a Year to Upkeep This Instagram Landmark, from Los Angeleno: “The pink, whose official Pantone name is Pink Ladies, is trademarked. It cannot be ordered from Sherwin Williams or any other paint store without a secret code. Jose Lemus has that code. ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ he says.”
First new blue pigment in 200 years now on sale to artists, from Smithsonian Magazine: “People have been looking for a good, durable blue color for a couple of centuries.”
A Natural History of the Artist’s Palette, from Public Domain Review: “During the last Ice Age life was nasty, brutish and short, yet humans still found time for art.”
Consider
Bernadette Sheridan is an artist and designer who sees letters and numbers as colors, a form of grapheme-color synesthesia. She created Synesthesia.me, which allows everyone to experience text the way she does. She also offers prints of her work via her Etsy store.
Last/first words
Whenever you find your way to your work this week, I encourage you to think about the possibilities for cross-pollinating your language with the concepts, structures, and aesthetics rooted in other forms of creative expression. Maybe you’re moved by music or gardening or visual arts or dance or quilting or pottery or something else entirely. What patterns or rhythms could you import from those mediums into yours? What techniques of those artists could help you produce text in a new and different way?
If you are the sort of writer who likes a prompt, then consider yourself prompted. And as you leave this page and make your way (hopefully) to your own, here’s a parting gift:
“The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?” ―James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Connect
You can find Sandra on Twitter, Instagram, and at sandrabarnidge.com. As always, thank you for being here.