Sooner or later, most writers go through a period of worrying that their work is full of clichés. Some folks take this to ridiculous extremes; one person I ran into was worried about their heroine’s hair color, because it just seemed clichéd to have her be blonde, brunette, or redhead, but the writer couldn’t think of anything else (non-natural hair colors having been discarded for some reason).
People fret endlesslyabout whether their plot has been used before, or used so often it’s become clichéd. Some of them get so worried that they deliberately invert every cliché they can identify, in hopes of avoiding anything that’s been done before. Unfortunately, the opposite of a cliché is no more original or not-clichéd than the cliché it’s based on, which is not at all.
The thing is, you can find a way to sum up anystory in one sentence that sounds clichéd, stupid, and/or boring. “An ambitious man murders his way to the throne, then commits more murders to cover up his crimes” is as much a description of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “Richard III” as of assorted evil-overlord modern fantasy stereotypes. It’s not the clichés; it’s what you do with them.
So…what do you do with them?
First, you pay attention to the details and to why you’re doing whatever-it-is. A lot of the time, a clichéd plot twist or stereotyped character is the easy road…and the easy road is seldom the most interesting or effective one, which is why clichés have such a bad name. Those are the times when you probably shouldn’t try using one.
But there are plenty of times when doing the “clichéd” thing is exactly what’s right for the story. Take the opening scenes of Lois Bujold’s Mirror Dance. Mark, the central character, looks at a wall covered with decorative mirror tiles and describes the splintered image of himself he sees there. Having a character describe himself by looking in a mirror is a horrible cliché that nearly every how-to-write book or blog recommends not doing…except that in this case, the fractured image is not only thematically appropriate and ties the title to the book in a way different from what unfolds later, it also hints that he sees himself as a broken image of his brother and foreshadows the eventual fracturing of Mark’s personality. It’s brilliant; nothing else would have worked on so many levels.
There are also times when you can use the reader’s familiarity with a cliché against them, so that they’re expecting one outcome from a situation and get another. This can be a dramatic twist or used for comic effect, depending on how you play it.
And of course, if you’re Shakespeare, you take the basic clichéd plot and write “Macbeth” or “Richard III.” Which is to say that very few people will complain if you take a too-familiar story or character and really dig deep into the motivations, make it rich, elaborate on the things it shows us about ourselves. Because the reason clichés are clichés is that they’re things that have been used way too often…and the reason they get used so often is that they have such broad appeal and recognition. And great literature is supposed to try to speak to the universality of the human condition, isn’t it?
Be warned that when I say “very few people will complain,” I don’t mean no people will complain. There are always folks around who have memorized a list of no-nos without understanding the reasons behind them, and they will complain bitterly if they notice you using anything on their list, regardless of what you’ve done with it or why. If this is going to bother you…grow a tougher skin. There is no reason to deny yourself a useful writing tool because some people loudly dislike it.
Re the last point – about people complaining. I’ve learned to figure out the complainers worldview (motivation) and then reinterpret the complaint from my worldview and then evaluate it.
For example, a friend of a friend is a music producer and he played a new song for me recently. I said that I didn’t like it at all, but that was an amazing thing because given the style of the music and comparing this dislike to the same level of dislike of other songs in the same style he was sure to have a hit on his hands! Because what I loathe in this particular style of music, the general public seems to adore. 😉
Alex – It’s always good to know where your critics are coming from. And it’s a rare and useful critic who can do that kind of analysis on him/herself, and point out that X is a problem point for them and so their comments about X should be taken with a large boulder of salt!
Red – There certainly are people like that, but when people get that far away from what is reasonable and rational, it’s a lot easier to ignore them, IME.
There are people who will say that any fantasy story that contains magic is a cliché, or that any science fiction story set in the future is a cliché.
I think you’re right that the important thing is how you handle cliches -not whether you have them. 🙂 Just to be funny once, I gave the villain in one story a handlebar mustache. It turned out that as my heroine grew and changed, her opinion of the mustache did too -from thinking it looked debonair to recognizing it (on him, at least) as a sign of pretension.
To add to what Red said, It really sucks if that person is someone who thinks he has a right to evaluate your work. When I was angsting about my novel, trying to figure out where things went wrong, my dad decided to tell me, “I know where you went wrong, it was when aliens landed on the beach.” As there were no aliens in my story, what he meant was ‘You screwed up when you decided to write genre fiction.’ I didn’t kill him, but it was a close thing.
But genre fiction is no more cliche than so-called ‘literary fiction.’ Non-genre fiction is kind of like non-accented english. It doesn’t exist, but powerful groups claim that one kind is ‘educated’ and ‘respectable’ and the other kind should be ‘fixed’, when all it does is reinforce hegemony and build more cliches and stereotypes.
Chicory, I’m still waiting for the story where the hero has a handlebar mustache. Perhaps he gets mistaken for a villain often, but by the end he starts a new fad of heroic-handlebars!
heroic-handlebars. 🙂 I like it.
Well, there is a book dealer who regularly shows up at WorldCons who sports a resplendent handlebar mustache, with the ends curled up & everything. Both Hercule Poirot & my baseball-history-loving spouse would approve. Being a book dealer is hero enough for anyone.
A book dealer is pretty heroic. My father suggested a member of a barbershop quartet, perhaps the base, which might offer some interesting drama. Now if I can work a c. 1920s newsboy baseball league into the picture, I might have a story!