One of the most common caveats writers strive to avoid early on is getting into the habit of using clichés. If it isn’t a matter of concern to you at first, it will be after an editor or critique partner reads your work. While it can be acceptable to throw in a common phrase now and then, especially in dialogue, you won’t make it very far as a professional if you litter your prose with them.
Why is this such a grammatical faux pas? From my point of view, it’s because you want your own style to come through your craft rather than defaulting to long-standing adages. If you’re serious about being an author, you don’t want to be a literary cover band, using other people’s expressions but putting your own spin on them. You want to have an original voice that your audience can grow to enjoy and hopefully be able to distinguish from other authors’.
Though originality should be at the forefront of our minds, we could end up chasing our tails (excuse the cliché!) if we endeavor to avoid any kind of cliché out there. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, science fiction authors can get away with a lot more in creating foreign concepts because that’s what their readers long for when they pick up the book. In other genres, however, readers want to be able to relate to characters and plotlines, even if they also want an escape.
To meet those expectations, you need to find the balance between having a believable story while also providing a fresh perspective. That’s a hard thing to do in reality, considering it’s been said that every story has already been told. Plus, we have to figure out how our characters and plot twists will surprise readers without making them give up on the story because of frustration over how farfetched they are.
To come up with a happy medium, we need to analyze what’s a cliché and what’s simply normal life. A no-brainer example of this would be that a woman’s pregnancy doesn’t typically exceed nine months. We wouldn’t begin to think of keeping a character pregnant forever in an effort not to be a cliché; it’s a fact of life. Similarly, there are other normal experiences people go through that we can and should put into our work because it will serve to draw in the audience so that they feel as though they’re tackling it with the characters.
The longer you live, the more you see clichés are born due to real life issues. While you ought not to go from one to another, scattering these regular matters in here and there won’t land you in writer prison. In my opinion, a good guideline to go by is the time period when the story takes place, setting, as well as the part of life your character is in. For instance, it would be normal for a visitor to Paris to want to eat a baguette or another popular type of French cuisine. On the other hand, if the character went to a French cafe just to order an American hot dog, you may be avoiding an obvious choice, but you’re risking disengaging the reader because it’d be a bit ridiculous. Of course, adding humorous quirks to a character can also liven up a plot, but you have to make sure you’re making that clear, perhaps by saying the person is a picky eater in this case.
The biggest lesson that can be learned from avoiding clichés is not to—dare I say it—take the easy way out. It’s always best to try to formulate your own wording and developments instead of copying someone else’s ideas. At the same time, we need to tap into our human side more so than trying to take on a complex, entirely original persona that may be hard for a reader to engage with and follow. If we include the occasional so-called cliché and yet contrive unexpected reactions to them, we’ll likely hold readers’ interest and empathy as well as amuse them and make them see the scenario in a different light.
KarinaBartow.com 
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