Thread: An Exercise.

This is an exercise I wrote for someone to help them develop their writing.

This is a simple exercise, you can write it down , or simply think it over in your head. Personally I go for writing things down, it gives me something tangible to look at and arrange the thoughts and understanding, and I spot things I would not have thought of otherwise.
This involves clichés. It is considered normal practice to avoid writing them, nevertheless, clichés are interesting. They are a phrase that has “chimed” with a great number of people, like “A bird in the bush”.

There are various reasons for this. Partly it will be in the phrase itself, the alliteration of “A bird in the bush” and the way the words run naturally makes the phrase appealing.

Then there is the meaning behind it. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” does not even contain the cliché, yet it is fairly obvious this i where it originates. I have heard children at the stage of practising language skills get into fits of laughter trying to construct a saying that starts “A bird in the bush is worth ... “.

This is what I want to do,
Take a cliché, I am going to use “That’s the way the ball bounces” for my example.
Then analyse what it means, resign yourself to fate in my example, life is unpredictable, we have to deal with it as best we can.
Now try and rephrase that idea, to help try and use rhyme and alliteration a little, but not too much, reject things that sound awkward.
Fate is fickle, you just have to cope.
Hmmm there is alliteration in the beginning there, but it is another cliché. Lets deal with the ideas in it;
there is the idea that events can be outside our control,
there is resigning yourself to the inevitable rather than fighting it,
and there is the idea of doing your best nevertheless.
Next think up phrases for them, well, last first how about
“It gets as good as I get.”
There is alliteration, and the “It” is a reference back to something out of my control, it’s close to the cliché “As good as it gets”, but I have avoided it.
Accept the inevitable, and, what will be will be are both cliché. How about picking bits of them and altering the order a bit
“What will be I accept, but it gets as good as I get.”
There are chimes, if not rhymes in “I accept” and “As I get”, and it can be said with a rhythm. I am reasonably pleased, your turn.

In case you are stuck here are some clichés to chose from:-
An ace up his sleeve.
Blood is thicker than water.
Brazen it out
Play your cards right
Smell a rat
Par for the course
A snake in the grass
Is the game worth the candle?

For all its un-cliché-ness, you may as well have said, “An old bastard in the bush” - a bastard of course being a metal file with coarse teeth, used for rasping rough edges off horses’ hooves. I think I’ve read a bit, and I’ve never heard of “A bird in the bush”, so it can’t be a cliché. I used to know a bird in the bush, but that’s another story.

As youngsters, we all knew a bird or two in the bush. Or three.

What I've heard used so often is the first part of that saying, so I would rate 'a bird in the hand' as a cliché rather than the last part. The saying can be rewritten thus: 'A shilling that's mine, I'm willing to say, is more than a dollar that's thine, any day'.

So I might answer the person who is jealous of another's wealth, or who is boastful of his own, or who is looking for me to invest in some wild scheme, by saying simply, 'A shilling that's mine...'

The point I was trying to convey was not in the example but in the exercise. Your observations make me consider that as the intent of the piece is instructional there could be good tactical reasons for making the example poor and stimulating the reader to try and do better. Such a thought did not occur to me earlier, despite anything you might be led to believe by my original post.

I went through this a couple of times. I didn't understand it.

Oh dear, how did you do with my "Untitled as yet" piece in the workshop? I will think about it a bit and then come back to explain what I am trying to do here more clearly.

Haven't checked it out. Will do now.

“Have you read all those books?”
“No these are mostly books I intend to read. There are some,” I indicated the complete “Thomas Hardy” set, leather bound and gold embossed, “that have some beauty in themselves, but are not my sort of reading at all.
One day I hope to encounter some enthusiast who will devour the content one last time before the acid paper and the bindings give way, as I did with the “Dickens”, but as with the Dickens I have read enough to know I have more urgent affairs to read and write, and to discuss their preservation is the eternal digression, a book is an idea made; like a chair or a wheel.
There’s not much room, bring in a garden chair, not elegant, but comfortable with a cushion. Here, turn the plastic bag inside out and pop the cushion in in, keep your clothes clean. I am sorry, I live like a bachelor Englishman in my shed, wood ash from the stove, gets everywhere.
Now, from what did I digress? Ah yes, the books.
A lot of them are “reference” books, things I have not read all of, but I find ideas in them.
A part of how we generate ideas is by ordering things, arranging them in groups, then finding patterns in the groups. When you pick up a reference book someone has already done the ordering bit for you.
You need to be a bit careful, selection procedures form bias, and they are arranged in some way. Sometimes the arrangements conform to conventions you want, sometimes they are random to your requirements, but at least you have information of a certain type brought together.“
As the movement and bustle of arrival settled they were themselves brought together in their chairs, and he looked round for something to settle on, a material object to focus and stabilise the emotional influences.
“A case in point.”
he said, reaching up and handing “Dictionary of clichés” by James Rogers down from the shelf above the desk.
“I bought it fairly randomly in a charity shop. There are some types of writing, like song writing, performance pieces, where cliché or near cliché, makes the ephemeral memorable, not that I had an immediate use, but you never know.
When I got back I flipped through it, as you are, I am always easier when someone opens a book than when they simply hold it.”
That worked, a smile, much more relaxed.
“The first thing I noticed was that I knew them all. Of course! They were all cliché ! I was still thinking partly about songs and I began to notice how many contained alliteration and rhyme. Then reading the definitions, I noticed how many of them also contain some sort of basic human idea, neatly encapsulated and compressed.
Going through I easily picked some that combined various aspects of difference and probably contributed to their popularity, let’s see, from memory ...
Alliteration and rhyme I already mentioned.”
He had created a bit of thinking time,
“ ... and a basic, human, thing, like danger, chance or fear, then there is the veneration of tradition. A lot of them contain words in original meanings that have changed over the years. Examples like “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” and the “It is the exception that prooves the rule” are cited and explained, until most people have been made aware of the original meaning of “proof” by word of mouth.
These clichés have powers of transmission of understanding formal educationalists might envy. Such things do not happen by chance, and that makes them worth looking at.
My initial proposal is an exercise whereby we take a cliché, strip it down to its essential meaning, then attempt to refashion it using the principles we have observed as tools. If I can write phrases that have half the staying power of cliché the literary establishment will be hailing me as brilliant.”
He sat back, redolent with self satisfaction, then remembered himself.
“But I musn’t keep you here to myself, squatting in this squalor, come up to the comfortable kitchen, meet the family. I suspect you might like tea?”

This was gripping, poignant, compelling, lyrical, a tour de force, readable, haunting, deceptively simple, rollicking, fully realised, timely, a page-turner and sweeping.

That said, it was also riveting, unflinching and powerful.




sometimes they are random to your requirements = sometimes they are surplus to your requirements

she was crying crocodile tears


the ideas:
the tears she wept were fake
false grief
forcefully causing tears to come out

coming down to:
forceful weeping, pseudo-seeping

I like pseudo-seeping, it would combine nicely with other things, psuedo-seeping sideways peeping, for example.

Ox. Take a book of quotations. If I require a thesaurus approach to the material, with it ordered in terms of subject and alphabetic ordering of first words, or ordering it by subject is going to be pretty random in terms of what I need. Surplus implies extra rather than un-related. But I can certainly do with restructuring that bit, thanks.

‘Twere naught to do with thesaurii or quotatii. The words came from a British newspaper article condemning book reviews, on the basis they all contained clichéd words. The journalist gave a list of such words, and I copied them for my post.

And I was refering to the last comment

sometimes they are random to your requirements = sometimes they are surplus to your requirements.

I had actually considered surplus but felt it didn't meet what I wanted and was hackneyed. It is good to know you didn't really mean any of that other stuff, but I might use it in a signature "Ox says of Olly's writing ..."