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

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I read for character and landscape and narrative tension first, and for plot, nifty concepts, and writing second. If I am sufficiently interested in the character and landscape and caught up by the narrative tension, I take little notice of cliched writing.

In some cases, of course, a book is simply badly written, and that does make it difficult if not impossible for me to read it.


But for every cliche, I can find an example where it didn't bother me either because it was done well or because I didn't care since I was enjoying the book for other reasons.

There are things that consistently bother me, but I think they mostly fall under the heading: "the writer didn't seem to have thought that through (or thought about it at all)" - iow, where a writer seems to have enhaled an assumption and then breathed it back onto the page without examination.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. The one thing that will stop me is badly done characterization--I don't read for plot of Cool Ideas. If I like the characters, I will put up with a lot otherwise.