I wrote a story in college about originality. It was supposed to be an essay that somehow ended up to be one of my best pieces. I still have it and read it occasionally and find it to be perfect. That being said, I'm a bad writer. I took English 101 4 times (granted because of credits not failing but sounds horrible, so it helps my point, which I'll get to as soon as I can just stop..hitting...keys) There. I'm a layman if there ever was one. I'm not trained but I've picked up very quickly from seeing. I've read articles about nothing being original, all the way to the question of plagiarist or even theft of a writer's work, to which the answer was "everyone can tell the story, only you can tell that story the way you do" I do worry about cliche's how I embody this one, break the m0ld on that...like can a layman get published? or just be succesful? Is talent real anymore or must everything be taught. (I just spend the last few weeks on changing punctuation, since I never new the "rules" but I get it. Readers need to know who's talking, or thinking etc) So there. Thank you for reading, and now humbly (as humbly as a person with a galaxy sized ego can) bows and crawls under the newbie rock AB
Clichés are surely by definition to be avoided for being banal and unoriginal. Only useable if they are deliberately meant to be clichés, such as representing the everyday speech of dull characters. If you mean clichéd plot points - then no, never. Not even in disguise. Why would you want to do to that to your readers?
In my opinion, if you're avoiding clichés simply for the sake of avoiding clichés, that's dishonest. Just write whatever the story calls for. If it has clichés, own that shit. Wave your cliché flag high, that's what I do. That's the beauty of "freedom of expression." You are free to express yourself however you please. I'm just going to toot my "Write whatever the hell makes you happy" horn and get out of here.
Hmmm - what would you class as a cliche? The ones I hate the most, are funerals in the rain, and dream sequences - you know, the ones where the character having the dream, twitches and groans in their sleep. Having had to write a funeral, I chose to do it in bright sunlight by a lake, and rather than burying a body with a very expensive coffin laden with more flowers than the local florist shop, they simply interred the person's ashes. Same goes for dreams. I did need to have a small dream section so rather than write the character twitching, I wrote the dream from the dreamer's POV, instead. Cliches, but different. Whether or not my two examples are unique, who knows?
Waking up from a dream in a cold sweat is also a cliche, but it happens to me often. Not just nightmares, but any intense dream.
Clichés are just lazy - it's the easy thing, just replicating what is already over-familiar. Originality is hard, but clichés are absolute anathema to me and if I commit one inadvertently (as I'm sure I often do), I would hang my head. Martin Amis thought so too - part of his autobiography is called "The War Against Cliché" (though some would say the war metaphor is clichéd in itself).
Cliches are generally staple so I don't see why they wouldn't work. Just don't make them as interesting as a staple lol
Cliché expressions or cliché ideas? I like twisting cliché expressions. I used cool as a cuke in one of my stories - rather than cool as a cucumber. I kinda liked how it sounded given the dialect, though someone dismissed it immediately as cliché. I think if your writing is sound to begin with the occasional cliché isn't going to matter - but at the same time, why go there? I was reading a newbie's story on another site and they mentioned emerald grass in a string of description which was supposed to be beautiful but wound up being familiar and unnecessary. I think that's the trouble with clichés - they're so overdone that the actual visual is dismissed and it just becomes noise on the page. If someone wants to mention grass as beautiful why not say something besides the fact that it's green - maybe that it was unmarred by cigarette butts or something. As for cliché ideas some of those are tropes and they're hard to get rid of especially if you're writing genre. The only thing that is going to freshen those up are the characters.
I think you can use them too many times, as with the emerald grass. If you constantly say emerald grass, it becomes a bit of a pain. I have described the still water of a pond as being like a looking glass. I've also taken a cliche and knocked it on it's head as in, the man coming in all bravado to rescue the girl from a male attacker. In my version, the male attacker turns on the bravado fueled man and the girl ends up being the one to save the day.
