Friday, October 12th, 2012 A while back, I wrote a post about clichés (and why you should avoid using them when you write). The post is old by web standards, but the information is still timely.
A cliché is a phrase or an expression that has become overly familiar through use. I’ll use my favorite example here. Two cliches should jump right out at you :
The car barreled down the road at breakneck speed.
General criticism states that a writer who uses clichés fails creatively; that he resorts to tired — easy — language rather than struggling to find the right words.
One of the nice things about clichés is that they provide a common reference point for people. In dialogue, clichés are great shortcuts for understanding. When the TV announcer tells you Superman is “faster than a speeding bullet…” you get a really good idea of how fast Superman flies, without having to hear the technical details.
It’s these mental pictures that make clichés such good prompts.
Here’s Your Prompt:
Below is a list of common clichés. Read them over. Stop when your mind creates a mental picture after reading. Write for ten or fifteen minutes about what you see. Don’t use the actual cliché in your prose.
- Slow as molasses.
- A bone of contention.
- Fanning the flames.
- Food for thought.
- Nose to the grindstone.
- The eleventh hour.
- Pissing into the wind.
- Cast pearls before swine.
- Old as dirt.
- Zigged when he should have zagged.
If you need further inspiration, here are two Web sites which have long lists of hackneyed phrases and expressions. They are:
Good luck!
Friday, April 6th, 2012 One of the big criticisms of fantasy fiction is ‘dining’ scenes. They often become the joke of the story, and it’s those scenes that are discussed as clichéd in reviews, no matter if they’re a key scene that the entire plot hinges on.
Three dwarves walk into a tavern…
See what I mean? Hard not to make a joke out of it.
But I’ll argue until I’m blue-faced that dining scenes are necessary to make the fiction realistic. And if you want to argue some more, I’ll state that these scenes are just as clichéd, if not more so, in other genres:
- the engagement announcement made at dinner (in any genre)
- the discussion of other worldly food (especially those slimy, living foods consumed by bug-like creatures) in science fiction novels
- the ‘let’s have a polite chat over dinner’ (but you know someone’s going to get killed) in a western or gangster story
- the cozy, steamy, dinner for two which escalates into a torrid love-fest of unusual positions and food in usual places
Your job with today’s prompts is to create a scene, a poem, a short story or vignette that is about food or dining, but isn’t clichéd.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write about one of these things:
- hunger
- simple dishes
- eating alone
- forbidden fruit
- temperamental chefs
- eating alone
- a family meal
- a holiday dinner
- family recipes
- Someone yells from off in the distance, “Come and get it!” You hear the klaxon sound of the triangle, bell, or digital tone if you happen to be aboard ship.
- These are the ingredients…
- Use the five senses (taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight) in your writing, but focus on one of them; for instance: the smell of fresh-brewed coffee; the site of lush, colorful fruit, the taste of something hot and spicy, salty or sweet; the sound of crunchy cereal, or fries sizzling in grease; the feel of salted nuts or buttery popcorn when you lift it out of the bowl…
- “Sustain me with raisin cakes, Refresh me with apples, Because I am lovesick. ~ Song of Solomon
- The refrigerator’s full, but there’s nothing to eat…
- The cupboard is bare…
- A pie eating, ice-cream eating, hot-dog eating, you-name-the-food-eating contest at the local fair
- Write about the guy standing on the corner who “Will Work for Food.”
Good luck!
Friday, March 9th, 2012  I’ve talked about cliches before in my “How to Write Like a Professional Journalist” post some time ago.
In that post, I stated that writers should work to eradicate clichés from their written words.
Clichés are shortcuts: a hackneyed phrase we use in a collective to get a point across very quickly. It’s easier to tell someone you didn’t come to work yesterday because you were “sick as a dog,” instead of going into detail about your fever, vomiting and chills.
Used in context, your friends will also “get” that you had the worst hangover ever if you let them know you were “sick as a dog,” after last night’s bachelor party.
In writing, however, clichés tend to make a writer sound like an amateur. (There are some exceptions to this, of course. I’ll get into them in another post.)
One thing clichés are useful for is giving your brain an immediate picture of what’s going on. If I use the term “man cave” to describe a guy’s office, some kind of image is going to flash into your mind.
The thing of it is, what I meant when I said “man cave,” and what you perceived (or saw) when you heard “man cave,” are probably two different things. So, in writing, you should take the time to explain things, rather than settling for the cliché.
Another thing clichés are good for — since they deliver an immediate picture postcard of the idea – is to use them as story starters or scene ideas.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Search your current writing for a cliché and re-write that passage to say what you really meant. (If it’s in dialogue, leave it alone. Dialogue is one of the exceptions!)
- If you want to write, but feel like you’re blocked, find a hackneyed phrase you like and see what it conjures up. Spend fifteen minutes free writing a journal entry, the beginning of a short story, a scene from a much larger work, or a poem.
- Do the same if you’re writing your memoirs, letters or working on genealogy: use the phrase to prompt a memory, then write what you recall.
If you can’t think of a phrase, the ClichéSite has a tremendous list of clichés. Wonderful!
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 Or, How to Write Copy Like a Trained Journalist – Part 1
I spent a lot of years working as a reporter. I find writing like a reporter is perfect for writing for the Web, and in most instances, can help to bring your fiction alive as well.
Journalistic writing is characterized by spare prose (“just the facts”), with the most important information at the beginning of the piece. There are other rules, usually found in a style guide (more on that in another post), which characterizes other parts of the writing.
One facet of journalistic writing is to avoid cliches.
A cliche is a phrase or an expression that has become overly familiar through use. Two cliches should be evident in the following sentence:
The car barreled down the road at breakneck speed.
Which of the following cliches haven’t you heard?
- a note of warning
- beat a hasty retreat
- black as night
- cool as a cucumber
- dazed and confused
- flood of tears
- green as grass
- hard as nails
- in the nick of time
- long-suffering
- made ends meet
- very much in evidence
(My original list was much longer…but it just looked silly on the page… I think you get the point.)
Cliches should never be used in a news or feature story (or fiction!), no matter how great the temptation–and temptation will beckon. (Trust me on this…it’s so much easier to write the cliche than to think up something new!)
And, there’s a reason why cliches are so popular: they’re familiar and easily understood by an audience. They bubble to the top of your thoughts when you’re considering what to write. And if you’re facing a deadline, it’s easy to rely on tired phrases to get your point across, rather than write fresh copy.
It’s much harder (not to mention more time consuming) to think up something new (especially if you’re like me. I like to dither over phrases and make them “perfect” before moving on.) But the use of cliche represents poor use of language, and in some cases, can identify the author as either inexperienced or, worse, lazy.
Appearing lazy can lose you commissions.
The problem with cliches is they make all stories sound the same:
The robbers terrorized their victims and made their escape on foot, fleeing with the loot.
So, the rule is: avoid cliches like the plague.
When writing fiction, don’t let your characters resort to cliched thought. Avoiding trite phrases will allow their personalities to develop. (And you may find that you learn more about your characters themselves if you have to work hard to make them think on their own, rather than relying on tried and true expressions to get their points across.)
When writing Web copy, keep your thoughts fresh and your words crackling. Cliches allow your reader to skim the writing, but if you use new language, your readers will actually have to think about what you write.
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