Tone deaf

[ksmith]

This post in janni's LJ triggered something that has bothered me off and on for years. I wonder if I'm tone deaf to cliched writing, or would know a cliche if it reared up and picked my pocket.

Is cliched writing in the eye of the reader? If you read a lot, and in many genres, do you have a more difficult time finding prose that strikes you as evocative or that moves you in some way? Are there cliches that are genre-specific--the romance images of heaving bosom and throbbing manhood come to mind.

If you have a sentence handy that you find cliched, could you please post it in this thread, along with the reason you feel it's a cliche?

Update: The character describing themselves while looking in a mirror or any other type of reflection--I've seen enough complaints about that one, although I admit to having used it before I had heard it was a cliche. Now I make a conscious effort to avoid doing it.

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

For me, I think it's more content than tone (and also that sufficiently well-handled language can make cliched content not matter so much).

In fantasy, one of the cliched things that makes me yawn is a book that opens with a loving, over-long description of the landscape, either as a character looks out upon it or moves through it. This can be done well, but it's done so often that it has to be done well to make me not look for something I'm less likely to have read before.

In YA fantasy--it's the book that opens with the misunderstood character in the magicky world, who you just know from the moment you see him is going to find a bit of magic and set out into the world. I wrote a book like this, before I knew just how cliched it was, and have only recently come to understand why I've gotten so many, "Well-written, but we already have too many books like this" type rejections. Because they do already have too many books like this.

But I actually did just read a book that did misunderstood-fantasy-protagonist well enough that it didn't feel like a cliche: Louise Spiegler's The Amethyst Road. Well, okay, it turned out not to be magic really moving events after all--but you didn't know that on, say, page 10--and the book still somehow felt fresh and original, where others didn't.

Do I guess nothing is irredeemably cliched; but maybe one has to do a better job with something that's been overdone to make the work that does it yet again stand out.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Do I guess nothing is irredeemably cliched; but maybe one has to do a better job with something that's been overdone to make the work that does it yet again stand out.

A cliched premise saved by the presentation.

Diana Wynne Jones' TOUGH GUIDE seems to tackle all the cliches in epic fantasy, along with all those "If I am the Evil Overlord, I will never do the following" lists. SF has some standards--the Adam and Eve story, the alien-seeming world that turns out to be Earth...although I think Planet of the Apes--the original, with Charlton Heston--did a good job with that.

I'm hearing rumblings that vampires are becoming cliche, which I'm sure will be news to the folks doing well by them at the moment.

Funny that when something does well, like DaVinci Code, we're swarmed with similar books. But when does similarity flip over into cliche, or are they even the same thing?

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

There are cliches, and there are marketing trends. Cliches are smaller-scale. That is, the cliche is in the story. A novel about vampires is a marketing trend. A novel about vampires angsting over being vampires is a cliche. When the marketing trend has gone on so long that only cliches are being written, the trend then ends.

The current vampire trend has been (in my experience) unusually long-lived. I think this is because (a) there's a surprising number of ways to look at vampires and other supernatural critters, (b) it hit the SF/F/H community far earlier than it hit the mainstream, so it looks long-lived to me (I'm sure there are people who were reading Da Vinci Code-esque books fifteen years ago who think that trend has been around a long time, too), and (c) I think the SF writer community in general is hyperaware of the existence of trite plots and works hard to avoid them. I don't think other genre communities or mainstream writers are quite so grapevined.

One can do a lot worse than using DWJ's book or the EO lists as a checklist of things to avoid (and hey, do romance or mystery writers have similar lists and books?). limyaael also does some good cliche-smacking on her (his?) lj.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

c) I think the SF writer community in general is hyperaware of the existence of trite plots and works hard to avoid them. I don't think other genre communities or mainstream writers are quite so grapevined.

This is very true. I've seen instances, though, where cliches in genre aren't considered so hackneyed when read through mainstream eyes.

I remember a minor dust-up on rec.arts.sf.written several years ago. A guy posted his synopsis for his book, and asked for feedback. The story revolved around the invention of a 'truth machine' that revolutionized society, and it got hammered by the Usenetters as being cliche/done to death/you name it. There was no love at all. The author was really taken aback. He had already sold the book to a mainstream publisher for what I guess was a decent deal--I recall seeing print ads for the book later on--and wanted the opinion of SF readers for some reason.

I've seen other instances in the past where genre SF authors write a more mainstream book that seems to based on a hackneyed premise. It's hackneyed to folks well-versed in the genre from whence it sprang, but to folks who read maybe one SF book every 2-3 years, it's brand new cool. I sometimes wonder how well Jurassic Park would have done if it had been released as a genre SF mmpb, because so many genre readers muttered about the bad science.

I muttered about the egregious soapboxing by a character supposedly on death's door, but that's just the way Crichton writes.