How To Avoid Clichés

I recently had a very disheartening meeting with my dissertation supervisor in which I was told my first draft was ‘packed full of clichés’. I went home and started writing a second draft and I was so shaken by the meeting that, to me, everything started to seem like a cliché.

I think it’s very easy to start writing in clichés when you’re writing in a style you’re not used to.  For instance, I usually write in first person and, more often than not, in present tense. But my dissertation is in third person past tense and I think, to compensate for my lack of confidence in this new style of writing, I started to write in clichés.

So this week I have been thinking a lot about clichés and how to avoid them. And I think the best way is to just to write exactly what you mean in a very straightforward manner. Don’t try to find metaphors for everything, don’t try to use overly figurative language to describe a scene. Describe exactly what your characters are seeing, feeling, doing.

However, you have to be very careful that this doesn’t get in the way of the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule. Being straightforward doesn’t mean you have to spell out exactly what’s happening. It’s all about choosing what to show and writing it in the right way.

Be specific. Using general descriptions of things tends to end up sounding clichéd. I’ll use an example. My dissertation originally opened with ‘As Katie stood on the doorstep of her grandmother’s house, confronted by overgrown hanging baskets and the chipped white paint of the normally pristine front door, she remembered her mother’s words’. I tried to describe the overall appearance of the front door and it resulted in something that sounds like a typical story book opening (Note: starting a story with the word 'as' tends to give it that 'storybook' feeling.)

Now it opens with a detailed description of what Katie sees in the hanging baskets and her thought process about how the baskets are usually only out during summer.

The new opening sets the scene much better and introduces the point of view of the character much earlier. It's specific, but still subtle, and it doesn't sound clichéd.

Clichés can also be used and subverted to create great descriptions. There’s a useful trick of taking a cliché like ‘his blood boiled’ and describing it specifically, as though it is really happening, which can turn out some interesting descriptive writing.

As far as I’m concerned, clichés can be useful. A first draft is meant to be bad. If you use clichés in a first draft just to get the story down, that’s fine. You can work on it later. But, in later drafts, you should try to avoid them.

Thanks for reading.