The Trouble With Cliché and What You Can Do About It

What’s the Trouble With Cliché?

Clichés are great when you’re looking for a way to quickly convey an idea in a few short words. The trouble is that when these everyday common usage phrases slip into your writing and stay there, they can push your prose from fabulous to meh.

Why?

Because not only are these phrases entirely overused, and therefore boring, they shout to the reader, “Lazy Writer Working Here!”

So, can do you do about it?

You strike a new chord. (Yes, I went there.) Reinvent the phrase. Dead as a Doornail? We’ve heard it millions of times. (And what the heck is a doornail, anyway?)

Here is a better way to describe how dead something is: Dead as the grass in my back yard. (Really. You should see it.) This not only conveys meaning about how dead something is, but gives you a glimpse into character.

Here’s another example: Dead as the lightning-struck tree in Cooper’s Field. Now, I’m providing you with setting and voice along with description.

Try using it to convey a character’s feelings about something: Dead as my ornery Aunt Clara. Dead as my poor old hound dog, Zeke. Dead as a smacked-flat mosquito. Dead as my dating life.

Revise and Reinvent

Go through your writing and find all the clichés that crept in there during the early drafts. Not just the clichés we hear every day in spoken language, but also the ones we read over and over. Once you find them, reinvent them in ways that provide the reader with more information than just what the original cliché conveyed. Make those phrases do more heavy lifting. Think about how your particular character might add her own feelings and/or flavor to the idea. Or how something about the setting can be described as part of it.

Flat as a pancake = Flat as road kill

Plenty of fish in the sea = Plenty of fleas on an old hound

Thick as thieves = Tight as toes in a too-small shoe

Cliché is weak. Cliché is boring. Cliché is lazy. But you can teach an old cliche new tricks!

That’s not to say you can’t use them in early drafts as handy placeholders for something better. But, during revisions, you will want to snuff them out like a birthday cake blazing with too many candles.

Get Creative and Make it Yours

Cliché reinvented is new, exciting, and all yours. Why not get creative and give it a try?

Happy writing!