I call clichés cunning for the simple reason they are so ingrained in our lives it’s easy for them to slip into our writing, unannounced and right under our noses. Hopefully, they only appear in your first draft, but sometimes it takes an eagle-eyed beta reader to ferret them out. These short phrases encapsulate a precise meaning most people recognize and so we use them almost without thinking.
But what, exactly, is a cliché? According to Webster’s, it is ‘something that has become overly familiar or commonplace.’ The problem with clichés is that, rather than enhance your writing, they make it mundane. I found this out the hard way after having submitted the first ten pages of a novel to a Harlequin editor at a conference. In her opinion, if I removed all the clichés, I would only have had half that number of pages to submit. Amongst those she pointed out were ‘cut like a knife’, ‘legs that went on forever’, and ‘like a bolt of lightning.’ She went on to explain that the use of clichés were the hallmarks of lazy writers and that if we, as writers, couldn’t replace them with fresh, exciting descriptions that kept readers reading, we didn’t deserve those readers.
As time has gone on, I have come to mostly catch myself but there are those genre-centric phrases that still leap out at me. Anyone who reads Regency romances will recognize the phrase ‘her toes curled in her boots’ or ‘she shattered’ at the culmination of a sexy romp. Then there is the descriptive phrase for our hero whose ‘hair was slightly longer than fashionable.’ I must admit to having used that last was one myself and not catching it until after the book came out in print.
One way to overcome using a cliché is to ask “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” as answering these questions can jump-start your imagination and provide specific details to more fully engage your readers. Clichés, more often than not, date themselves and are therefore worn-out and well past their sell-by date. Old and stale does not make for a good read. For more on the subject of clichés, look on the Internet for some of the American humorist Frank Sullivan’s essays about Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, as published in The New Yorker magazine or, just for fun, take a few of your favorite clichés and re-write them. I dare you!
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