/lit/ - Literature

>>20317966
Yep, it's a little purple. There's a lot of top-down sentence construction and tangents. Once I got past the first paragraph though I thought it flowed nicely. Its structure is archaic, but if that's your voice, write in your voice. The "modern" voice is very Hemingway/fast fast fast to the action because the modern reader doesn't have the attention span to read a book longer than a pamphlet. I'm now upset so I'm going to hijack my own post.
I was talking to a coworker today about books and he incredulously said, "My wife read War & Peace--for FUN." And I said, "Isn't reading supposed to be fun?" We laughed but it really got me thinking. Back in the day, huge novels like that were like the multi-season TV shows of day, and the serialized novel the episodic release. You didn't buy War & Peace to churn through it in an afternoon like an episode of Spongebob. You bought War & Peace to read it over several weeks or months like a modern episodic TV show would keep you now. Big books were there to remain a part of your life for a long time and get revisited on occasion, and now they're seen as some sort of big hulking triumph that you only read to show off instead of enjoy.
I don't really know whether to feel sad or angry that literature has fallen this hard in the face of technology. It just feels wrong to think this way. Maybe we've been conditioned to consoom so much content that the idea of lazing back with War & Peace or Monte Cristo or Karamazov feels like we're missing out on something else.
Anyways, back to your story. If you really care about deleting purple prose, leave some things for the reader to populate and stop going on tangents.