Susie Helme
There are 4 problems with clichés:
1. Readers don’t like them, so their eyes just skip over. They end up reading the whole sentence without comprehending the meaning.
2. They don’t add any information. They just bog the reader down with unnecessary words. After you’ve Shown through dialogue how tense the meeting was, Telling us ‘the tension was palpable’ doesn’t add any new understanding for us.
3. They are old ideas (that’s why they’ve become cliché). You want to treat the reader to something they’ve never read before. If you are not being New and Unique, you are being Boring.
4. They often don’t make logical sense (and one just hears the words, without hearing the meaning). In the above example ‘palpable’ means you can touch it, but how can one touch tension? They can even be oxymoronic. How can a ‘silence’ be ‘deafening’? Don’t say x ‘tears at the fabric of y’ unless y can actually be pictured as a fabric (NOT ‘fabric of existence’, ‘fabric of time’). They can often be inappropriate for the character or the setting. Saying ‘she felt as forlorn as a newborn calf separated from its mother’ works great if she’s a cowgirl, absolutely wrong if she’s a pirate.
Don’t say something is ‘selling like hotcakes’ or that someone ‘dresses to kill’ or is the ‘spitting image’ of somebody (correctly, it is ‘spit and image’). Don’t ‘avoid’ things ‘like the plague’. These are clichés we’re so familiar with, we even laugh when we spot them.
There are ones that sneak up on you. Don’t use phrases like ‘time-worn’, ‘age-old’ more than once per manuscript. If you say, ‘the very x’ or ‘x itself’, only do it once. Don’t say people’s faces are ‘etched with’ things more than once. ‘Eyes smouldering like embers’ probably not even once.
Watch out for adverbs or adjectives that seem inextricably glued to your noun or verb like a Homeric epithet. In the Odyssey, dawn must be ‘rosy-fingered’; Zeus must be ‘far-seeing’; the sea must be ‘wine-dark’. But you are not Homer. Not all halts are ‘screeching’. Not all hot days are ‘scorching’. Rain is not always ‘like cats and dogs’. A storm is not always ‘brewing’ or ‘raging’.
You’re not really building suspense by telling us there’s a ‘peculiar disquiet’, a ‘chill in the air’ or that ‘something is amiss’. You’re just making our eyes glaze over.
It’s too easy to segue your scene change with ‘meanwhile, back at the ranch…’ Instead use sensory links or other techniques.
Purple prose
It’s tempting to spend many long minutes choosing gorgeous metaphors, adjectives and adverbs, when often, it’s better writing style just to get straight to the point. Go straight to the action, scene setting, dialogue and character development. Adjectives and adverbs Tell the reader ‘feel this’, but you want to Show the reader how to feel by the power of your prose and the realness of your characters.
As a general rule, I suggest no more than one gorgeous metaphor per paragraph. Of course, it’s a question of quality not quantity. You want to have ‘the best words’. But if your eyes have read something umpteen times, chances are it’s a cliché. How many times have you read ‘like a bed of roses’, ‘a bull in a china shop’, ‘storm in a teacup’, ‘heart of gold’, ‘dark horse’, ‘melting pot’. Loads, right. Let’s instead give the reader something New and Unique.
Often, you don’t need to simply delete. You can save your carefully crafted wordy phrases and use them somewhere else. In some cases, it IS just a question of quantity. Too many gorgeous words and phrases in quick succession, adjective and adverb pile-up and/or too many strong words in one sentence can tend to the purple.
‘Golden tendrils of dawn just peeking above the horizon like a shy virgin’ is too much for one sentence. But you might use ‘golden tendrils’ or ‘just peeking’ or ‘shy virgin’ somewhere else where the reader won’t be overwhelmed by them.
Repair the damage
Sometimes you can repair.
Vary your words a bit to eliminate the purple/cliché elements. ‘The dawn was just peeking above the horizon, its golden rays…’
Make the experience unique to your character. ‘The golden tendrils of dawn falling upon her sleeping bag filled her with relief after the arduous night…’
Personify your metaphor by turning it into a simile. ‘Dawn, the shy virgin…’
Make the cliché adjectives or metaphors into verbs or nouns. ‘The rays illuminated her sleeping bag, turning it golden’.
Use dialogue or internal monologue. ‘Look, Albert, dawn.’ What a relief, she thought, after…’
Use action or props. ‘She peeled back the cover of her sleeping bag. The shy rays of dawn promised relief…’
Use sensory clues. What does your character See, Hear, Smell, Feel? ‘She sighed with relief, seeing the first rays…’
You can often clean your cliché by just changing one word. ‘in the heart of the busy city…’ becomes ‘located in the centre of…’
Or making it specific. The ‘chill in the air’ becomes ‘a chill that smelled of crocuses’.
Tropes
There are Plot clichés, too, which have become tropes. ‘Shadowy figures lurking around corners’. ‘Age-old trees watching like sentinels’. ‘Everything went dark, then—a scream’.
Don’t shortcut character development of your villain by simply calling him a ‘psychopath’.
Among the 10 top clichéd tropes are: The love triangle; the damsel in distress; the (‘ancient’) prophecy coming true; characters always say something important while dying; protagonists never listen to advice; the playboy falls for the nerdy girl; millionaires are sick of their money; and bad guys attack one at a time. The hero is either ‘flawed’/ ‘rebellious’/‘a loose cannon’ or ‘perfect’. If one of these is your Concept, you’re not doing something New and Unique.
Less is More
Stop pontificating, and just get on with what you want to say. Skip the extra verbiage and just cut straight to the action, dialogue or character development.
Try deleting the adjective/adverb pile-ups, the purple phrasing, the cliché metaphors, and read your passages out loud to yourself. Not only will your ear hear the meaning in your words better but you will find that the trimmed down version is more powerful writing.
Bounds Green Book Writers 