How to Write Stories People Will Love

Question 17: Breaking cliches

Jily25 asks: How do you break cliches?

The first thing I'd like to do is make a distinction between cliches and tropes. A trope, within the context of fiction writing, is a storytelling pattern or convention. For example, "the chosen one" is a popular fantasy trope. "Bad boy is tamed by good girl" is a popular romance trope.

On their own, tropes aren't a bad thing. It's hard to come up with something that hasn't been done already. What makes them cliches is when it's executed in a way that's been done a thousand times already. It includes overused phrases and predictable situations. Cliches are bad because they're boring. Some examples of tired phrases and scenarios:

- "The more the merrier."

- "She let go of the breath she didn't know she'd been holding."

- The villain tells the hero his plans before failing to kill the hero.

- The hero doesn't make sure the villain is dead, and the villain makes a near-killing blow because the hero isn't paying attention.

The only way to avoid cliches is to recognize them. This is yet another reason why reading other books is so important. You start to see all the common ways stories are told, and you can avoid doing the same exact thing.

Avoiding Tired Phrases

Cliched sentences are easy to avoid once you recognize them. Simply say it a different way. There are endless ways to say the same thing. There's no need to say it the same way thousands of others have. I don't know how many times I've seen, "She let go of the breath she didn't know she'd been holding." It's gotten to the point where every time I see it, it distracts me from the story. Knowing this, we can come up with other ways to say the same thing:

Her lungs ached, and she discovered she'd stopped breathing.

She exhaled suddenly, realizing she'd held her breath.

"Breathe, girl! You look like a statue!"

Dealing with Overused Scenarios

Sometimes cliches are unavoidable because we simply can't think of a different way for the story to progress. This happens to me a lot. The way I deal with it is to recognize it as a cliche within the story. For example, if we take the cliche of the villain spilling his plans to the hero right before the hero escapes, I might add something cheeky to it, like this:

"Why don't you be a cliched villain for me and tell me all your plans before you kill me?"

By recognizing a cliche in your writing, and then calling it out as such, you beat the reader to the punch. This makes it seem intentional, like you're poking fun at cliches instead of trying to cover up the fact that you couldn't think of a different scenario.

None of these tactics will work, however, if you don't recognize the cliche in the first place. So read as much as you can! The more you read, the more likely you'll see certain phrases and scenes being used too many times.