Avoiding Cliche

Vaz

Vaz

We're in the pipe, five by five.
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Okay, after watching Interstellar with a friend it got me thinking about whether all, or most stories if you strip them down to the bare bones contain some common cliché.

The reason I ask, is because while I personally loved Interstellar. My friend hated it for containing cliché's.(Boooooo!)

And it just got me thinking about my WIPs and the story I'm trying to tell within them, especially the emotional side of the stories, aren't they all slightly clichéd? If not, how can we avoid them?



Any thoughts would be welcome.

Cheers - Vaz ;)
 
Make clichés and Stereotypes work for you so the action / dialogue isn't padded. It's only when they are a substitute for the story they are annoying. Of course some clichés are just annoying.
 
Most stories contain archetypal elements. If they didn't, they wouldn't work. If something feels true and necessary at a deep psychological level, it's an archetype. If something feels true only at the level of convention or convenience, that's a cliche.

Cliches should be avoided because they never satisfy, whereas archetypes do. There's a grey area between the two where one person's archetype might be another's cliche, and vice versa.
 
it's when there's NOTHING BUT cliches that it gets unbearable.

Readers /viewers notice it pretty soon when the cliches betray a total lack of invention on the part of it's creator .
personally,I'd buy the cliche of the mad scientist if the characterization of the mad scientist is good...and his motivations believable
 
singer songwriter cliche
everybody,sit up and take notice
someone taking a cliche apart



For a NON-cliche movie about POSSIBLY the end of the world: TAKE SHELTER

10 out of ten for that one,absolutely AVOIDS all the cliches of the genre

Mike Shannon and Jessica Chastain put in the performance of their lives
 
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I think you can't guarantee that you will avoid cliches, and you can spend a lot of time worrying about it too much. However...

If your ideas are coming second hand, from other books, it's increasingly likely that cliches will creep in. So if your book about tough space commandos is researched from other novels about tough space commandos, it's quite likely. And if it's researched from films and TV or even (God forbid) computer games, it's virtually certain.

Also, it helps to know why everything is in a story and what function it has. If there are things in the story that drop into place too easily, or aren't realistic in that story's setting, or are just there because they seemed cool, it's likely that they've been done before. One of the tricks in avoiding cliche, I think, is to avoid asking "What would this kind of guy do in this kind of situation?" but to ask "What would this exact person do in this particular situation"? Quite often, the situations and broad characters of different stories are quite similar. The issue is what you personally can do with them.
 
I embrace the cliche - in my experience I'm more original when I don't even try to avoid it. Part of me thinks it's because it is when I'm aware I have got an idea from somewhere else that is when I work to make it unrecognisable.

I've always been surprised to find the "most original" parts of my stories according to others are those I find the least original.

An example is my bird shifters. I got the idea watching He-Man (1980s) and the Sorceress.
 
at any rate try to avoid the following

"his neck snapped like a dry twig"
"her eyes burned with a fierce hunger for him"
"his heart threatened to explode in his chest"
"a red mist descended before his eyes "
"a black veil clouded his mind,and his legs gave way instantly"
"Her maniacal laughter kept echoing in his ears".
 
"It was a dark and stormy night..."

So cliché that it has become super dense and sucks in everything that should be avoided.

Actually that might be interesting to put as a theme for a 75 worder, just to see how we all can try and work around it...
 
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avoid
''bullets swarmed around him like so many angry bees''
"the sea was like a featureless mirror"
"the heavy wrought iron door closed with an ominous sound"
"his face was contorted with rage"
avoid voluptuously shaped female robots,heroes with "craggy,leathery faces",evil machines("my programming motivates me to kill you")
human voices with somehow a metallic sound to them proclaiming "insufficient data"
sharp U-turns at whatever speed the spaceship happens to be travelling at
people plotting to eradicate mankind because they had a difficult childhood
people in zero gravity behaving like they have zero mass
heroines having "a musical laugh"
heavyset heroes with "a light thread that belies their bulk"
desert planets with "cameloids"
the infamous "Spider-monkey alien"
asteroid pirates
coming out of hyperspace with all thrusters blazing
modeling a planet after Walburton-on-Sea,only with five suns in the sky and blueish vegetation
avoid naming a new element eorgelucasium,eternium,premium, willsolveallofhumanitysproblemsium,antandecium,motherinlawium
avoid aliens looking like upright-walking badgers,homing pigeons,"humanoid amphibians"
 
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