Anyone who’s been taught anything about writing is told to avoid clichés at all costs. They’re treated like some monstrous disease that will infect your entire work and render it useless if used at all, in any quantity. Personally, I think that’s unfair.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for originality. The biggest fear I have with my writing – besides not succeeding – is ending up writing about another single mother who has a secret tragic past that comes back to haunt her in an explosive turn of events. Or writing about the young man whose father escapes from prison and wants him dead. You know, the typical thriller. Dean Koontz is one of my favourite authors and he has some really great original ideas but some of his books can be a bit like that.
But I digress. I was talking about clichés having a bad reputation. It’s not that I would like to write a story with a million cliché lines in it, it’s just that I’m wary of the formation of a cliché itself. Thinking about this logically, it would seem that every cliché once started off as an original idea or saying. It would be safe to presume that between it being original to it becoming cliché, it would have become popular; so much so that it got worn out. For the idea to become popular it had to be revolutionary, or effective. If this is the case, then perhaps clichés are just ideas or concepts that have gone out of date. Take the shower scene in Pyscho, for instance. What once terrified audiences has now become a roll-your-eyes type scenario.
This worries me. It feels like writers now have too many potholes they have to avoid in order to spare themselves from being cliché. Just how many different ways of phrasing things are there left that won’t flag up this crucial criticism? I mentioned about the almost stereotypical thriller story earlier; how long until tragic pasts become cliché? Are they cliché already? Must writers really avoid telling certain stories simply because they’re too similar to older ones?
Typically, constructive criticism doesn’t frustrate me. It’s useful and helpful, and nowadays is given to me by people far more experienced than myself. But I do feel a slight pang of annoyance when someone points out that one of my characters is being cliché. I wrote that character acting that particular way because it benefits the story, but because that particular aspect has been done before, I have to work around it.
This isn’t supposed to be a whinge. It’s just interesting to me that the concept of the cliché exists, and how it can undermine writers at times. I suppose my concern about this is a variant of the classic fear that writers are going to run out of original stories to tell. Look at soap operas and cheap dramas, and pay attention to how often they repeat storylines with different characters. I’m willing to sacrifice the knowledge that I enjoy Waterloo Road a little too much, if it means I can use it as an example. While I love the show, I have to admit that they repeat the same stories every few seasons, just with different characters. A few examples are the students with terminal illnesses, the personal life of the head-teachers going haywire, and the constant teacher-student misunderstandings that could cost somebody their job (but somehow never does).
I’m not sure this blog post really has a point. Maybe it is a whinge and I’m too proud to realise it. One could say that it makes sense for certain ideas, phrasings and genres to become stale and overdone. I’m sure I’ll disagree vehemently with my stubborn defence of clichés, a few years down the line. Stay tuned for my self-contradiction!
Perpetually Perturbed 