On cliches
(Throughout the course of this entry, pretend I've bothered to put the little accent thingy on the e. :P)
This is a subject I've thought about before (especially around nano time) but I was just reminded again last night while piddling around with Yahoo Answers. They've got this promo thingy going on where a bunch of famous guys ask questions, and currently they've got Donald Trump asking what we can learn from successful entrepreneurs. So a nice little discussion got started about learning from their mistakes too, and someone made the comment "but learning from mistakes is so cliche!" At this point I wanted to bonk my head into something.
Find any group of writers, and sooner or later someone's bound to bring up the subject of how to avoid cliches. But are cliches really such a bad thing?
Take any piece of writing, and ruthlessly remove all the cliches. Does the result have any resemblance whatsoever to human experience? Probably not. And it'll probably be a pretty boring story to boot, since there's not gonna be a whole lot of it left.
Things get to be cliche because that's the way things happen. The metaphors might change a bit, but this is still true. Maybe nobody's built a monster and been all excited about it until said monster goes on a rampage and kills random people...but how many people have been all excited about having a baby, until it gets old enough to commit grand theft auto or become a rapist?
I'm not saying that you should fill your stories with cliches from beginning to end. I'm just saying you shouldn't refuse to give someone an abusive alcoholic father because you think abusive alcoholic fathers are cliche. Maybe your story would be better if it was an abusive alcoholic mother or a weepy suicidal alcoholic father instead, but then again maybe not. Your main consideration should be how interesting and true any given element would make your story, not how cliche it is. If you just make a blanket statement that "my story will NOT contain any cliches" you're cutting out as many possibilities as if you tried to write a story consisting entirely of cliches.
And how many times have you heard someone say "Oh that woman just had a baby...how cliche!"? :P
This is a subject I've thought about before (especially around nano time) but I was just reminded again last night while piddling around with Yahoo Answers. They've got this promo thingy going on where a bunch of famous guys ask questions, and currently they've got Donald Trump asking what we can learn from successful entrepreneurs. So a nice little discussion got started about learning from their mistakes too, and someone made the comment "but learning from mistakes is so cliche!" At this point I wanted to bonk my head into something.
Find any group of writers, and sooner or later someone's bound to bring up the subject of how to avoid cliches. But are cliches really such a bad thing?
Take any piece of writing, and ruthlessly remove all the cliches. Does the result have any resemblance whatsoever to human experience? Probably not. And it'll probably be a pretty boring story to boot, since there's not gonna be a whole lot of it left.
Things get to be cliche because that's the way things happen. The metaphors might change a bit, but this is still true. Maybe nobody's built a monster and been all excited about it until said monster goes on a rampage and kills random people...but how many people have been all excited about having a baby, until it gets old enough to commit grand theft auto or become a rapist?
I'm not saying that you should fill your stories with cliches from beginning to end. I'm just saying you shouldn't refuse to give someone an abusive alcoholic father because you think abusive alcoholic fathers are cliche. Maybe your story would be better if it was an abusive alcoholic mother or a weepy suicidal alcoholic father instead, but then again maybe not. Your main consideration should be how interesting and true any given element would make your story, not how cliche it is. If you just make a blanket statement that "my story will NOT contain any cliches" you're cutting out as many possibilities as if you tried to write a story consisting entirely of cliches.
And how many times have you heard someone say "Oh that woman just had a baby...how cliche!"? :P