This is the last post in our series on stereotypes, tropes, and clichés. Since we’ve already done the first two, now we’re in the home stretch!
So what is a cliché? Simply put, a cliché is anything that has been widely overused by many people. They’re predictable, they’re unoriginal, and they’re boring. In writing, a cliché can be a phrase, such as “sleeping like the dead”, or a type of description (comparing a person’s eyes to the ocean is popular), or even a character (gawky unpopular girl who suddenly finds out she has special abilities and now must use them to save the world? Check!). A trope, as we covered yesterday, is a specific type of cliché, and the use of tropes isn’t always a bad thing. Today, instead of covering trope-type clichés (characters, plot ideas, or settings), we’re going to cover the actual use of clichéd phrases or description.
We’ve all seen them before. “It was a dark and stormy night”, “He was ugly as sin”, or “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” are easy to recognize - but how about phrases like “slippery as an eel”, “quick as a wink”, or “icing on the cake”? When people can’t come up with a metaphor or a simile to use, often times they fall back on clichés. If you use a couple here and there in dialogue, nobody will really think anything of it - after all, that’s how people talk! It’s when you use them in narration that a problem arises. Instead of using your own words and ideas, you’re just regurgitating the same boring phrases anyone could spit out, and that’s usually not a good thing.
There are also writing clichés that have nothing to do with specific phrases and everything to do with what you’re writing. How many times have you seen somebody describe their character by having them look in the mirror? And how many times have you encountered a character who is The Chosen One in a story, destined by birth or whatever to save the world, end a war, repopulate the species, or something else along those lines? If we’ve seen it once, we’ve seen it a hundred times…and if your story is just like one that someone has read a hundred times before, chances are they’re not going to remember much else about it. Can these scenes and plots be done well? Absolutely, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Think about it: do you really want your story to be so much alike to someone else’s that they can’t tell them apart?
Now comes the hard part. I can’t tell you how to avoid using clichés. I really, really can’t. It all comes down to you: your story, your characters, your voice. Only you can write something new in your own particular, unique style. All I can tell you is to be on the lookout for clichés and try to avoid them, if you can; it gives you a chance to flex your creative muscles and describe something in a whole new way! Good luck!