Ah, the dreaded cliché! The worst feedback a writer can get is, "Well, it sounds sort of cliché, doesn't it?"
All authors want to be original. If someone even mentions that a writer's work reminds them of someone else's, the writer tenses up. "No, no, no, I'm nothing like him," he says swiftly. "I've never even read him."
"Yeah, but it's kinda like him," the reader persists, believing she is giving a compliment rather than an insult. "He's incredible, you should read him!"
The thing is-- it should be a compliment when a reader compares your work to a published writer. We all have our influences. It is important to know that there is no new idea. If you've considered something, odds are there was someone before you who considered that very same idea. It doesn't make you unoriginal or a copy-cat. It just makes you human.
You as an individual are very unique. Our experiences, family, friends, and personality combine to make a fingerprint that no other can replicate exactly. And even if you came up with the idea of a scientist and his alter-ego without ever even hearing of Robert Louis Stevenson, you can still write that story and add your own personal perspective on it. T.S. Eliot once sinabi that "Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal."
And who do we consider to be great writers? Shakespeare. Steinbeck. Dante. Poe. Do you really believe their ideas were completely their own? Shakespeare, for example, wrote numerous plays with creative plots that he borrowed either from history or from stories much older than he was. Romeo and Juliet was a retelling of the old Roman Romance, Pyramus and Thisbe, with smatterings of history. He does not try to hide the roots of his plays. In fact, he often celebrates them. In A Midsummer Night's Dream for example, the Mechanicals parody this tale sa pamamagitan ng putting on a poor performance of it. If you think that it ends with that, Twelfth Night is based on an old Italian story, Gl’ Ingannati. Othello's tale comes from Cinthio's Desdemona.
If Shakespeare's Pagsulat was not original, why is he celebrated? For the way he tells these classic tales and makes them his own. His language, his characters, and the way he strings together history and fiction into beautiful pieces of theater. To say nothing of Steinbeck and Dante who used the Bible madami often than once, or Poe who used classic poetic patterns to make his prose madami interesting. Every good writer steals from one another.
This includes what we call the "cliché." All a cliché is, in the end, is an old idea. Now you have two choices when it comes to clichés: embrace them or reject them. Do not dilly-dally between the two. Because if you write something and believe it's a cliché, and you didn't want it to be a cliché but you leave it as it is, it will come off as poorly executed. No one will be interested in it. They'll say, "It's been done before, and I don't care." This isn't to say that clichés don't have their uses! In fact, embracing a cliché and remodeling it can make a very interesting work. These can come off as a critical text, a parody, or even a complete reevaluation of the original cliché.
Let us take for example the classic tale of The Stinky Cheese Man, which completely deconstructs the old fairy tale, The Gingerbread Man. Fairy tales are often remodeled because they are the oldest and most familiar cliché of them all. Gregory Maguire has created a career out of transforming old, two-dimensional fairy tales into political commentaries. The appeal of clichés is that they are so familiar to us, when we find them in unfamiliar territory, it startles us. Another example of remolding the cliché in telebisyon and film is the work of Joss Whedon's Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Not only does he change the meaning of the word "vampire," but he changes our idea of a "slayer," not only sa pamamagitan ng making her female, but making her a blonde cheerleader.
Certain schools of literature and theater have made a whole genre out of parodying clichés. Existentialism challenges things that the world takes for granted (Camus, Calvino) and Beckett and Ives drafted Theater of the Absurd out of cliché concepts.
So the cliché is not something that we necessarily need to avoid at all costs. Every cliché can be retold and remodeled into something new. If you find that you have (accidentally) written a cliché, don't just abandon it! Embrace it! Take for example, the following short, short story.
Once upon a time there was a princess. She had beautiful long blond hair and loved skipping out in the woods on the weekends looking for adorable woodland creatures to call her pets. Then one araw she stumbled upon a frog. She found it to be so cute that she kissed it and it turned into a prince!
Rather than ending this tale with a "Happily Ever After," try to think of a few madami interesting endings other than that.
Examples: The princess dragged the prince to the kastilyo to be married immediately. The prince, still dazed and confused sa pamamagitan ng the fact that he was suddenly human, went back to his usual ways of lounging about and eating flies until the princess began to nag him incessantly. Furious, he decides he loathes the whiny beast and marches back tahanan to his swamp, where he lives still, sitting on a rock and eating flies, doing as he pleases.
The princess screamed and began beating this stranger with her pitaka before pulling out her mace and threatening to call the police and running back to her castle.
It is not difficult to put a new spin on an old idea. Those examples were just off the tuktok of my head, but if you put madami thought in it, just imagine the ways you can twist an old cliché for your own devices!
Just a recap: It is not a bad thing if something you write reminds someone of something else. "Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal." And embrace or reject a cliché. If you waver in the middle of each, then it will come off poorly. It is a perfectly fine thing to embrace a cliché, and plenty of good works of literature have come out of such a practice.
All authors want to be original. If someone even mentions that a writer's work reminds them of someone else's, the writer tenses up. "No, no, no, I'm nothing like him," he says swiftly. "I've never even read him."
"Yeah, but it's kinda like him," the reader persists, believing she is giving a compliment rather than an insult. "He's incredible, you should read him!"
The thing is-- it should be a compliment when a reader compares your work to a published writer. We all have our influences. It is important to know that there is no new idea. If you've considered something, odds are there was someone before you who considered that very same idea. It doesn't make you unoriginal or a copy-cat. It just makes you human.
You as an individual are very unique. Our experiences, family, friends, and personality combine to make a fingerprint that no other can replicate exactly. And even if you came up with the idea of a scientist and his alter-ego without ever even hearing of Robert Louis Stevenson, you can still write that story and add your own personal perspective on it. T.S. Eliot once sinabi that "Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal."
And who do we consider to be great writers? Shakespeare. Steinbeck. Dante. Poe. Do you really believe their ideas were completely their own? Shakespeare, for example, wrote numerous plays with creative plots that he borrowed either from history or from stories much older than he was. Romeo and Juliet was a retelling of the old Roman Romance, Pyramus and Thisbe, with smatterings of history. He does not try to hide the roots of his plays. In fact, he often celebrates them. In A Midsummer Night's Dream for example, the Mechanicals parody this tale sa pamamagitan ng putting on a poor performance of it. If you think that it ends with that, Twelfth Night is based on an old Italian story, Gl’ Ingannati. Othello's tale comes from Cinthio's Desdemona.
If Shakespeare's Pagsulat was not original, why is he celebrated? For the way he tells these classic tales and makes them his own. His language, his characters, and the way he strings together history and fiction into beautiful pieces of theater. To say nothing of Steinbeck and Dante who used the Bible madami often than once, or Poe who used classic poetic patterns to make his prose madami interesting. Every good writer steals from one another.
This includes what we call the "cliché." All a cliché is, in the end, is an old idea. Now you have two choices when it comes to clichés: embrace them or reject them. Do not dilly-dally between the two. Because if you write something and believe it's a cliché, and you didn't want it to be a cliché but you leave it as it is, it will come off as poorly executed. No one will be interested in it. They'll say, "It's been done before, and I don't care." This isn't to say that clichés don't have their uses! In fact, embracing a cliché and remodeling it can make a very interesting work. These can come off as a critical text, a parody, or even a complete reevaluation of the original cliché.
Let us take for example the classic tale of The Stinky Cheese Man, which completely deconstructs the old fairy tale, The Gingerbread Man. Fairy tales are often remodeled because they are the oldest and most familiar cliché of them all. Gregory Maguire has created a career out of transforming old, two-dimensional fairy tales into political commentaries. The appeal of clichés is that they are so familiar to us, when we find them in unfamiliar territory, it startles us. Another example of remolding the cliché in telebisyon and film is the work of Joss Whedon's Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Not only does he change the meaning of the word "vampire," but he changes our idea of a "slayer," not only sa pamamagitan ng making her female, but making her a blonde cheerleader.
Certain schools of literature and theater have made a whole genre out of parodying clichés. Existentialism challenges things that the world takes for granted (Camus, Calvino) and Beckett and Ives drafted Theater of the Absurd out of cliché concepts.
So the cliché is not something that we necessarily need to avoid at all costs. Every cliché can be retold and remodeled into something new. If you find that you have (accidentally) written a cliché, don't just abandon it! Embrace it! Take for example, the following short, short story.
Once upon a time there was a princess. She had beautiful long blond hair and loved skipping out in the woods on the weekends looking for adorable woodland creatures to call her pets. Then one araw she stumbled upon a frog. She found it to be so cute that she kissed it and it turned into a prince!
Rather than ending this tale with a "Happily Ever After," try to think of a few madami interesting endings other than that.
Examples: The princess dragged the prince to the kastilyo to be married immediately. The prince, still dazed and confused sa pamamagitan ng the fact that he was suddenly human, went back to his usual ways of lounging about and eating flies until the princess began to nag him incessantly. Furious, he decides he loathes the whiny beast and marches back tahanan to his swamp, where he lives still, sitting on a rock and eating flies, doing as he pleases.
The princess screamed and began beating this stranger with her pitaka before pulling out her mace and threatening to call the police and running back to her castle.
It is not difficult to put a new spin on an old idea. Those examples were just off the tuktok of my head, but if you put madami thought in it, just imagine the ways you can twist an old cliché for your own devices!
Just a recap: It is not a bad thing if something you write reminds someone of something else. "Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal." And embrace or reject a cliché. If you waver in the middle of each, then it will come off poorly. It is a perfectly fine thing to embrace a cliché, and plenty of good works of literature have come out of such a practice.
This is a story; my story. I am Damien Cole Demidov. My grandparents are full-blooded Russian. I am twenty-one years old, and I’ve been locked up in an asylum for four years.
I have black hair about four inches from my shoulders. I am vampire pale. I have crystal blue eyes. I’m 5’9’’.
I have met many a person in my time. Maybe you’ll meet some of the throughout the story.
Anywho, I live in the U.S. now, shipped over with my mom when I was twelve. I live in New York City at the moment. My mom is back in Russia with my father, and grandparents.
Now, let’s see what’s in store for us.
I have black hair about four inches from my shoulders. I am vampire pale. I have crystal blue eyes. I’m 5’9’’.
I have met many a person in my time. Maybe you’ll meet some of the throughout the story.
Anywho, I live in the U.S. now, shipped over with my mom when I was twelve. I live in New York City at the moment. My mom is back in Russia with my father, and grandparents.
Now, let’s see what’s in store for us.
Here I spread the mga kulay of my life
They sound like a tune of fife
They always closed me in a dark room
I put on my headphones, enjoyed & played the boom
It's so boring to just see the sky
Today I decided I'll go and fly
Eveyones mind is full of depressions
But mine is full of imaginations
I changed the dark night into shining sequins
And the heap into beautiful fragrance
I don't want you to make my hair a mess
Cause I'm wearing the tiara to be a princess
My passion, my obsession, my desire
Don't interfere in between or I'll blow you up with flames of fire
They sound like a tune of fife
They always closed me in a dark room
I put on my headphones, enjoyed & played the boom
It's so boring to just see the sky
Today I decided I'll go and fly
Eveyones mind is full of depressions
But mine is full of imaginations
I changed the dark night into shining sequins
And the heap into beautiful fragrance
I don't want you to make my hair a mess
Cause I'm wearing the tiara to be a princess
My passion, my obsession, my desire
Don't interfere in between or I'll blow you up with flames of fire
I wake up. It's early in the morning. A cool wind blows sa pamamagitan ng my face whispering sounds i don't understand. I look up at the sky and notice that it is a light blue color and it makes me feel that there is no problems in the world. Looking around i get a different story.
Blood everywhere. Bodies over bodies and not a living soul in sight. Who could have done this? My head starts to spin and my vision is going blurry. A creature appears from the wind that was flying sa pamamagitan ng my head earlier.
This creature starts walking torwards me speaking in a language that I have never heard before. I go to reach for my gun and find a giant hole in my right leg. It continues to get closer and closer and is staring at me as if to be a hunter and I am it's prey.
Knowing that this is the end I look up at the sky. Beginning to close my eyes the last of my sights are focused ont he Blue Skys.
Blood everywhere. Bodies over bodies and not a living soul in sight. Who could have done this? My head starts to spin and my vision is going blurry. A creature appears from the wind that was flying sa pamamagitan ng my head earlier.
This creature starts walking torwards me speaking in a language that I have never heard before. I go to reach for my gun and find a giant hole in my right leg. It continues to get closer and closer and is staring at me as if to be a hunter and I am it's prey.
Knowing that this is the end I look up at the sky. Beginning to close my eyes the last of my sights are focused ont he Blue Skys.