How to stop purple prose in AI roleplay replies
Updated
Purple prose is overwritten, flowery description: eyes as "orbs", a breath you didn't know you were holding, a voice barely above a whisper. Models fall back on it because romance and fantasy writing is full of these phrases. Edit them out of recent replies, show the style you want in the greeting and example lines, and ask for plain, concrete prose. On UnsavedAI, Edit fixes a single line of a reply.
Try it now, free, no account neededStart a story with Della BrennanThe night editor shreds your story at 2 a.m. Then she stays until dawn helping you fix it.The usual suspects
| Stock phrase | What it is trying to say | Plainer version |
|---|---|---|
| A shiver ran down her spine | She is nervous or cold | She pulls her sleeves over her hands |
| Orbs, cerulean depths | His eyes | His eyes, grey and bloodshot |
| A voice barely above a whisper | Quietly | She says it to the table, not to you |
| A breath she didn't know she was holding | Relief | She sits down hard |
| Electricity where your hands touched | Attraction | He doesn't move his hand away |
| The air thick with tension | An awkward silence | Nobody reaches for the bill |
The plain versions are not shorter for the sake of it. Each is a specific action you can picture, which is what the stock phrase was gesturing at.
Why models write like this
Purple prose is an average. Across the fiction a model learned from, certain phrases sit at the centre of every tense or tender moment, so when a scene turns emotional, those phrases are the likeliest words. A high temperature adds more ornate word choices on top. And once two or three of them are in the chat, the model treats them as this story's house style, which is the part you can fix today.
Edit the style the model is reading
Go back over the last three or four replies and replace each stock phrase with something concrete, as in the table. You are not polishing for its own sake; you are changing the samples the next reply is written from. Keep one flourish if you like the mood.
With Lucien Ashmore, the vampire who came with your suspiciously cheap castle:
Before: *Lucien's crimson orbs bore into your very soul as his voice, a velvet caress barely above a whisper, filled the ancient hall.* After: *Lucien doesn't get up. He turns a page of the ledger, finds your name and taps it once.* "The previous owner also thought the price was a bargain." *The candle beside him has burned to a stub. He has been waiting a while.*
On UnsavedAI, Edit changes one line of their reply and leaves the rest; in SillyTavern and JanitorAI the message edit button does the same job. If the same phrase comes back word for word, that is a loop more than a style problem, and stopping repetition covers it.
Ask for a plain style, and show it
A note that describes the style works better than a list of banned words: (OOC: plainer prose from here: concrete actions and details, short sentences, one precise image instead of three adjectives.) Naming one or two phrases to avoid is fine, but a long blacklist puts those very words in front of the model.
If you wrote the character, the greeting and example lines set the house style, so write them the way you want replies to read. Della Brennan, a night editor bleeding red ink over your story at 2 a.m., is a good model: her greeting is all concrete detail, a red pen behind her ear, a candy cigarette tapped like ash, a buried fact in paragraph nine.
Samplers and standing instructions
If you control the samplers, a temperature one notch lower, 0.8 instead of 1.0, trims ornate word choice without flattening the voice; roleplay sampler settings has safe ranges. A style line in SillyTavern's Main Prompt or a JanitorAI proxy's custom prompt holds better than an OOC note because it is sent every turn: "Prose: plain, specific and physical. No clichés. Prefer one exact detail to a string of adjectives."
Questions people ask
Is all descriptive writing purple prose?
No. Rich description is fine when it is specific to this scene. Purple prose is description that could sit in any scene: stacked adjectives and stock phrases.
Why is it worse in romantic or emotional scenes?
Those are the scenes where stock phrases cluster in published fiction, so the model reaches for them most there. Edit hardest during those scenes.
Will a bigger model write better prose?
Usually a little richer and less generic, but every model has pet phrases. Editing the chat works on all of them.
