MCRW Article: Dead as a Doornail, The Ease of a Good Cliche

Dead as a Doornail: The Ease of a Good Cliché
Author: Jody Wallace
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: July 2002

Did your latest chapter or scene flow out of your fingertips like magic? Did every word seem destined, preordained, and meant to be? No hesitating over the perfect word or accurate description? Was it the easiest thing you have ever written?

If that's the case, chances are you just scripted about a hundred clichés, trite expressions and mundane phrases. Now don't get your hackles up, as they say. The best and the worst of us rely on various clichés — our own or other people's — to get through first drafts. To quote Donna Baker, author of Writing a Romantic Novel and Getting It Published: "Clichés are like ants. They'll creep in anywhere and be running all over your story before you know it. Dianne Doubtfire, author of The Wrong Face and other novels, says: ‘If a phrase feels familiar, it's probably because it's a cliché.…So if you get that feeling of familiarity, stop and rethink. (Page 32)

In spite of our current disdain for them, clichés have a very respectable and ancient history. Before a majority of folks could read and write, they relied upon storytellers to provide entertainment and record their cultural histories. These storytellers, in turn, relied upon pat phrases, rhythm, alliteration and rhymes to aid their memories. In Beowulf and other Old English tales, descriptions and phrases were repeated nearly every time the poet had the opportunity. Originality was not an issue; due to the vast bank of oral literature a "scop" was required to memorize, clichés were a great help.

The closest contemporary form to the oral literature of yore is rap music, oddly enough. Listen to a few verses and you will notice that the authors seldom hesitate to employ cliché after cliché in their efforts to create rap's trademark rhymes and syncopated meter. Rap is at its heart a spontaneous format, with participants ad-libbing verses, so they, like scops, rely upon established phrasing and rhyming patterns. In fact, rap has been around long enough that it has produced its own body of clichés. If I say, "Throw your hands in the air," you probably have a good idea of what comes next! And how shall one wave those hands? Like you just don't care.

However, unless we are writing a rap, we do not want our work to be riddled with triteness. Some clichés are so sneaky, writers might not even recognize them, and like rap, we run the risk of manufacturing our own set of clichés if we do not watch ourselves. This is a little different than just using the same words too often, although that's part of it. Personal or genre clichés are more like describing kissing or hair or emotions the same way too frequently. Ever read a book where the heroine's tresses were constantly lush and her skin always delicate?

So how do we tame the tendency to rely upon clichés in our writing? First, one must develop the ability to recognize them. On one of the most extensive Web sites for clichés I found, Cliché Finder http://www.westegg.com/cliche/, the author discusses the differences between true clichés and mere commonplace expressions. "A cliché," he explains, "is not just something that lots of people say; it's something that lots of people say and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliché is, in other words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse." "That sucks!" is not a cliché, no matter how often people say it, although Bart Simpson's other favorite phrase, "Don't have a cow", is.

It's easier to find clichés in other people's work than it is your own, especially when you are cranking out that all-important first draft. Read a chapter of a novel or short story you consider very well written and one you consider poorly written and do "cliché checks". Which one has more pat phrases and worn out descriptions? Once you have done that, turn your eye to your own work, and be honest with yourself. Do your characters speak as unoriginally as, well, rappers (minus the profanity, I hope)? Does your vocabulary need freshening? Are your words a cliché of themselves? For more ideas, two Web sites that contain cliché-avoiding exercises are:

http://www.richmond.edu/~writing/wweb/cliche.html and

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~nickym/Cliches.html

One last note: as you strive to eradicate clichés from your writing with the aid of Cliché Finder, your imagination and your trusty thesaurus, don't strive so earnestly that you cease to make sense. While exploding clichés can be a lot of fun (see the Tanya Huff reference below), if not done carefully, it can be confusing. Also, don't stretch so far that your vocabulary becomes a hodgepodge of multi-syllabic gibberish. In John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, he points out that, "Simple language, for some kinds of fiction at least, can be more effective than complex language, which can lead to stiltedness" (Page 144). And stilted is something we don't want any more than we do trite.

Cliché sites on the Web:

http://www.westegg.com/cliche/: The Cliché Finder is a fantastic, streamlined cliché database that works quickly and allows you to submit your own clichés.

http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sybev/cliche/: The Book of Clichés provides pat sayings for all situations, in particular "phrases to say in times of trouble." The entries on this site lean more towards folksy sayings than the kinds of clichés that would be in fiction writing, however.

Other Sources:

Baker, Donna. Writing a Romantic Novel and Getting It Published. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1998.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

http://www.angelcynn.org.uk/: This Beowulf page provides links to information about Anglo-Saxon culture, language, warfare techniques, scops, and so on. Can you imagine Beowulf as a time traveling hero? I always imagined him as more of an action hero resembling Arnold S., but, as you can see from the many translations, it's open to interpretation.

Here you can find an e-text and translation of Beowulf: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo.html, although this is not my favorite. Seamus Heaney's award-winning version is the latest in a series of many translations of the original text. Michael Creighton's Eaters of the Dead, aka The 13th Warrior (also a movie of the same name), is reminiscent of Beowulf as well, and fans of Tolkien will be intrigued by the Beowulfian overtones in Tolkien's work, particularly The Hobbit.

The Georgetown University Web site: http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/alpha.html has links to plenty of Old English poetry if you want to get your metaphor and simile juices flowing.