Excellent question. Purple prose happens when we try too hard to develop a clever style.

When it comes to developing your own style and expressing ideas with flair, I have a saying: "Good is great."

Even the most elaborate prose is really just a collection of simple parts. Your challenge as a writer is to gather an abundance of simple details and insights and then arrange them in a pleasing and engaging way.

Let me give you an example, which I develop in my book The Elements of Writing. This passage comes from Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a devastating critique of modern architecture:

"Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors—and then hires a decorator, gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse."

That passage, I think you'll agree is filled with a dizzying array of details. can you imagine writing a paragraph so laden with style and pizzazz? Of course ... if you first gathered specific details, like these:

Every great law firm in New York

moves without a sputter of protest

into a glass-box office building

with concrete slab floors

and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings

and plasterboard walls

and pygmy corridors

—and then hires a decorator,

gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars

to turn these mean cubes and grids

into a horizontal fantasy

of a Restoration townhouse.

See?

If you're attentive and collect lots of ideas and details, you can create the same kind of dizzying style as the late, great Tom Wolfe, one of the creators of the influential New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s.