Today we see that every cliché is a missed opportunity to actually write.
What I gleaned about the story: A very young girl gifted with uncanny knowledge and erratic behavior is about to become the only hope for a small band of city folks stranded in the woods during Armageddon. (But I’m really building windmills here.)
Find this book on Amazon.
Analysis: Makes you think big brother’s doing just fine, so why isn’t little sister, right? Except, further down that page, we find out that Bobby is dead. What? But she just said he had no problems. Is he a zombie or something? A zombie who’s doing well in school? Scanning back… Oh. Another case of missing past perfect. That should have read: Bobby, her first child, had had no problem…
Analysis: Want to win me over as a reader? When you get to the part where you need to tell me about the echoing, cavernous sense of loss that accompanies memories of your dead child, tell me in a way that affects me. Reach inside my soul with your words and plant an image there that forces me to feel the experience for myself. The hopelessness. The guilt. The crushing alone-ness.
Karen’s heart caught as they passed the senior elementary school where Bobby would be going if he were still alive. Pain squeezed her chest like a vise.
This is exactly the point in the story where powerful writing can win over the reader. But when you allow yourself to fall back on a familiar phrase like that, it completely clubs the opportunity over the head and drags it into an alley.
Or imagine a woman who has had her soul puréed, still scrambling to get out from under that tragic loss – and the ensuing divorce – while also desperate to make a good life for her remaining child. Imagine that she has finally managed to find work and that it’s bringing in enough to let her provide food and a roof, but not much more. Imagine her immense pride at finally being able to do even that little, but know that her pride is at war with her shame over not being able to provide more. Imagine her dread certainty that this disadvantaged home life is the root cause of her daughter’s strange behavior and problems at school. Imagine her looking with lingering rage at the larger, better kept homes in her neighborhood as she drives her clunker car home at the end of another trying day. Then pack all of that into a few well chosen words and disembowel me with them as she gets out of the car.
At that point in the story we get: The house wasn’t much, but it was home.
I don’t mean that every moment of every novel needs to be crammed with poetic brilliance, but one of the reasons we read stories is to get a new take on the human experience. Some new way of looking at a situation, or some original expression of how it feels. The job of a writer, I think, is to do more than simply concoct a sequence of dramatic events and express them without grammatical error. It’s to tell it your way, with your words. That’s what makes it engaging. That’s what makes it real. It’s you reaching out to me, and in the moment I read your words, we connect. Like electricity.
But when you reach for the stock phrase, all that power dissipates. It grounds out into the vast, generic anonymity of the collected masses. It stops being you telling your specific story, and becomes the everyman relating the average experience. And I don’t need that. I already know the clichés. Tell me something new.
Note: If you’re not sure whether a line is a bit too commonplace, try this: type the key part of the phrase into Google (in quotes) and see how many hits you get. As an experiment, I Googled “wasn’t much, but it was home.” (Doing it this way accounts for all the different house-nouns for which that sentence-template might have been used: a house, a trailer, an apartment, a castle, etc.) Google tells me there were 710,000 occurrences. Similarly, if we search for “squeezed her chest like a vise,” we only get 5 hits. But when I use “his” instead of “her” I got 15,000. And that’s a sign that you might dig deeper and try something of your own.
Followed in the next paragraph by: Karen watched her daughter with the woman who, in the last few months, had become her closest friend.
Analysis: All this best-friending is making me dizzy. Which “her” is indicated? Karen? But we already said that, up above. Then I see: The affection between the two was evident, yet Karen felt no jealousy. So from that, I now know she meant that Maria had become Roxy’s best friend. The pronoun was technically used correctly here. (Since Maria didn’t likely become her own best friend, the “her” will devolve to the next most recent female cited: the daughter, Roxy.) So it wasn’t technically a case of a miscast pronoun, but it’s always dicey to rely on them in a scene that has multiple characters of the same sex. This particular case was further confounded by the fact that we had only just been told about a different BFF relationship. And since this was the second or third case of pronoun confusion I’d seen, this one was enough of a head-scratcher for me to stop the clock.
Thanks for the heads up on some of my bad habits. I will definitely keep my eyes open for these tendencies in the future (and do some revising right now). Your tip about how to check for cliches was also helpful.
Was hoping you’d read longer but you can’t win ’em all (or sometimes any of them). :)
Inge,
I’m impressed with any of the IoD book reports over 15 minutes… most don’t seem to make it that far. I’m also impressed with your responses to the critique, that’s always a tough spot to be in, and your grace under the pressure reflects well on you as a professional.
Best of Luck with your writing! :)
-robin
Thanks Robin!
BTW, re. cliche searching on Google, how many hits is bad?
Good question, Inge. But there’s no definitive answer. It’s a matter of how much is too much for you. And also, how well known the other citations are. If I found out that an expression I used had also been in a Stephen King novel, I would probably avoid it, even if that was the only Google hit. But as a general rule of thumb, I’d be looking for a hit count of less than 10, and none of them famous. Although ideally, I’d want to see that “No results found” message.
Line one: “with wild excitement in her eyes” 6740 hits, including Wendy’s Adventures in Neverland.
?
Sure, that particular phrase has been used by other writers, but it’s nowhere near commonplace, and I don’t think anyone would call it a cliché. I’m not saying that every phrase in a book has to be unique. But if I write one that strikes me as maybe too familiar, enough so that I bother to check it, then my instinct is to stomp down hard. If I’m going to the trouble to rewrite something because it felt too unoriginal to me, then I want to replace it with something very original, if I can. Still, every author has to set their own bar on this.
Hey Jeff, I’m curious how you define a cliche then? I’ve seen “wild excitement in her eyes” a lot, as I have seen many other descriptive phrases. When is a descriptive phrase a cliche and when is it just common phrasing?
There is no hard and fast rule. To me, a cliché is something that I have encountered so often that it now distracts me from the story when I see it. (Those who follow the IOD might like to think of this as “cultural echoing.”) But which terms trigger it and which ones don’t is going to be different for every reader. It depends on what else you’ve read. Another good test for yourself is to ask whether you used the phrase because you’ve heard it before, used in a similar situation, or whether you crafted the phrase on your own. We don’t always know which is which, unfortunately, but in cases where you do recognize it from previous experience, you might want to investigate further.
It also matters where you’re using the phrase in your text. The more important the sentence is in the dramatic arc of the story, the more you want to be conscious of its originality, because the problem with clichés (as Wikipedia points out) is that they are so commonplace that they’ve been leached of their descriptive power.
“Another good test for yourself is to ask whether you used the phrase because you’ve heard it before, used in a similar situation, or whether you crafted the phrase on your own.”
Well, the one phrase I used I used because it was the phrase that would have occurred to my character. She wouldn’t be thinking about unique ways of putting her feelings as she was thinking them.
But I get your point. Not sure if the googling thing is the way to go though. I did google one of the phrases I used in another piece “Her heart fluttered, as if stretched out to dry in a wind,” and got no hits. But something like that would not suit this character or the tone of this particular story.
By the way, a professional editor (and traditionally published best-selling author) did edit the first chapter for me and did not point out any of the things you noticed.
Not trying to argue — your blog, your rules, your choice.
Your input is much appreciated and I am going to “fix” the items you pointed out. Not quite sure how yet, but it will happen. :)
I’m the first to admit that dealing with clichés is a thorny process, Inge. And the point you raised about whether the character would use a cliché or not is entirely valid. I myself see a difference between using them in dialogue vs using them in narration, but so long as you are making conscious choices about how to use them, it doesn’t really matter what I think. I’m just one reader, and every writer should feel free to establish whatever stylistic voice suits them best, readers be damned. :-)