I'm not sure how I feel about clichés. Even that tepid opinion would get me laughed
out of a few writers groups. Clichés are
the devil, right? To be avoided at all
costs?
I’m not so sure. Isn’t
there a certain amount of comfort in a cliché?
Isn’t a cliché simply a way of communicating a concept at its
heart? Can they be overused? For sure! But is ‘being on the same page’ with someone
really such a bad thing? The answer to
that argument is that a cliché is basically lazy writing, that a writer should
spend the time to convey the concept in a new and exciting way (fresh!). If you are under a time limit when you are
writing, must the choice be between originality or ease of communication?
I used to think so.
Then I realized that I didn’t think all clichés were evil, that, in
fact, I kind of liked some of them. Is
that just my rebellious side showing through as it is wont to do (especially at
inopportune moments)? I don’t think so.
It’s about resonance.
The emotional connection with either what is being communicated or the
way it is. All writers strive for
resonance—creating the connection with the reader. And whether we know it or not we are
embarking upon that high wire act between familiar and original. Familiar can create that resonance, that
connection to keep the reader interested and hopefully invested in the
characters we create. But make your tale
too familiar and we risk boring the reader.
So, we spice it up. We spin a
yarn like none ever experienced before (again, hopefully) and our reader loves
us for it, tells their friends, and sets us up for a great career path as a
teller of tales.
The more I thought about it, the more comfortable I was
using the occasional cliché. I made my
peace with breaking that particular writing rule. But then I kept thinking (silly brain!) and
wondering how far the comfort level of familiarity applies. We all hear about the ‘formulaic’ Hollywood movies. Isn’t formulaic the same concept as cliché? I mean, a certain fictional setup wouldn’t
have become a formula if it wasn’t quite successful in first place, just the
same way a cliché doesn’t really become a cliché unless it is used over and
over enough to make it into our common language.
Is formulaic bad? Is that even a fair question—bad and good
being denominations of taste and therefore indefinable except on the individual
level? (Got a little college-y with that last one, sorry.)
Well, I don’t have an answer to that except to say it all
comes down to the tight rope that we walk when we write. Only, we don’t know if we are keeping our
balance as we go. We only find that out
later when our work reaches the masses and is either embraced or shunned. Happy writing to all!
Linky Links:
Here is link to a cool lecture by Malcolm Gladwell (Blink,
Outliers) talking about Hollywood formula makers at a New Yorker conference:
