Kamisama

I've been told that cliches should be avoided in formal and academic writing, but what about other forms of writing?

Does it really matter if a person uses a cliche or not? I feel as though not using a cliche is restrictive to one's writing and disables him or her to ease the reader through a reading. What's so bad about using cliches?

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Stewart

It depends what context your are thinking of. Are you thinking of fiction?

They've been used so often so as to be comical and have little effect. Part of the joy of writing is description and finding new ways to say things. If you have to resort to cliche then you shouldn't bother writing fiction as you obviously lack any ability to see the world anew.

However, cliched characters are par for the course. Just find interesting new ways to present them.

And cliched phrases in dialogue is fine, if it is meant to demonstrate how unoriginal a character is.

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dwellerofthedeep

Interesting thought. I'm not sure really what to think but I believe cliches are considered to be bad because they may have either become boring from overuse or simply show a lack of creativity.

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Kamisama

I don´t find cliches boring. I find cliches to be entertaining.

They may show a lack of creativity, but some people may, nonetheless, find them entertaining. Most readers, unless looking at specifics (grammar, punctuation, etc.), don't care about the creativity of something; as long as the message or idea of the writing was transmitted in a decent and easy-to-read fashion, the reader has obtained what he or she wanted from a text.

I've been questioning this because most readers are not writers. And most writers will be willing to criticize another's writing. For the majority of readers, they may (with some critical thinking) notice these things are cliches and shouldn't be used in writing. But I´m sure more readers are interested in reading something for its intended purpose than criticizing the writer´s style.

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Stewart

If you want to use cliches then Lulu is just for you.

However, if you are going to use cliches to reach any sort of market then remember that you have to get past agents, editors, and publishers. They want interesting works and not derivative crap. Although some would make you wonder...

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FrankBlissett

Cliches may be par-for-the-course for some forms of writing (romance and other "dime-store" novels), but for most fiction they make things too predictable. You know those fluff novels that people buy in the airport lobby while on vacation and leave in the hotel room, only having read a couple chapters before getting bored? The reader got bored because the characters were stock, as was the plot and settings - in other words, cliches abounded.

However, there are (IMHO) places to use them:

Dime-store novels - you don't intend to sell high volume so use them to speed the writing process.

Irony - though this is best used when offset by fresher ideas elsewhere and great writing overall.

Children and YA stories - when the theme is a moral lesson (ie, teach that name-calling is wrong), the expectations that come with cliches can be helpful. Even here, though, it seems to me that stock characters are becoming less common.

-Frank

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Fantasy of You

I'm temptped to say 'they are cliches' and I guess I just did, so never mind.

It depends what the cliche is. If you write fantasy as your story line is a peasant farmer who has to avenge the death of his family and somehow how demon-like sword skills, then the cliche is terrible. Cliches like that are just annoying, because it shows a total lack of imagination.

The questions is pretty broad. Basically, excludingpurposeful use for comedy ect. cliches show a total lack of originality, imagination and commitment from an author. IMO.

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Krim

So just because your readers don't care about cliches doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid them? Last time I checked, any truly memorable novel has been an original piece of work that has a good twist to it, and the originality is often commended. But if you want to write the same thing as 99% of the other fiction writers out there and get absolutely no where because you thought that 'oh, readers don't care', then you're cheating well-versed costumers looking for something new.

Or you could copy Jim Theis and see if you can be so bad you're famous.

I can't honestly see why you would actually like cliches. Because you know, I never get tired of sissy elves and evil emperors.

thamior

yes well as a lyricist I run into this alot. And i'll get scenarios where I have a plausible setting and such, and a thoguht will come to my mind. I'll put it down only to have it called cliche because someone has done it before. I mean, at this point in time, ALOT of things have been done before, and to disregard someone's work because they might have unknowingly stumbled upon something someone else did, but it was original to them, that takes all the joy out of writing.

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Krim

Yup. That about sums it up. You're a lyricist/linguist; no one ever said it's easy.

Anyway, there are varying levels of cliche. Farmboy kills an evil emperor? Inexcusable. A gluttonous man that may as well be a pig? Excusable.

thamior

well I guess I mean in images, like I using raindrops, and rain, because of the sensations it brings, which are unique, but its attacked as cliche. When you are forced to always double check you writing and others to avoid "cliches" there is no fun in writing then.

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Krim

Varying levels of cliche...there are plot cliches:

cliched elves
farmer boy hero
instantly learning to be an excellent swordsman

and then there are miniature, barely noticeable instances like with rain that no one really tacks onto as being unoriginal. It's not like you can make every scene have a doomsday scenario with a vivid background of twisting meteors and black holes to make it completely original.

Wait...you could...

FrankBlissett

Just because something's been done before doesn't mean it's cliche - as you noted, most everything's been done before. Cliche isn't "that's been done before", but "that's been done so many times that I'm getting tired of it".

Hmm - this brings up another point alltogether. How do we distinguish between cliche and iconography? Is there a difference? Middle-ages iconography was intended to use art as a substitute for writing as most were illiterate, so they used standardized metaphoric images for certain themes and stock-characters (if it's not being irreverant to call Jesus and Moses "stock" ).

So, are some modern cliches so iconographic that they are excusable? IMHO, using rain in a song lyric to represent sadness is one such occassion.

-Frank

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Straylight

This is just my opinion, but cliches are cliches because they're predictable, and if you string a long enough chain of 'predictable' together in fiction, it destroys the realism of the world, makes it go from a collective story between the writer and the reader to words on a page. I like feeling that the writer is one step ahead of me, not the other way around.

~SL

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thamior

well my only problem is that I think people have cheapened the use of Cliche, if they have seen it done before, or even a particular image many times before they have it engrained in their minds as a cliche when it is actually anything but

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