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

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

[Rock 1, LJ is not kind to long-winded sorts!

I wonder if I'm tone deaf to cliched writing, or would know a cliche if it reared up and picked my pocket.

Different people are tonedeaf to different things. At a Boskone out in Framingham I remember a conversation that included two editors and a long-time reader that meandered on the landscape of what they can/can't read/like/dislike and why, the long-time reader said that he's looking for idea and doesn't much notice style or lack thereof, or cardboard characters.

"cliches" fall into a bunch of different categories,
- the cliched scene

(I don't comprehend the attraction for what comes off to me as essentially plagiarism in commercial cinematography, wherein a scene that makes no sense to me, turns out to be "homage" to some other film, generally one that I regard as hapless/hopeless tripe, copying that scene's framing, content, etc., and it only has relevance if one has seen the film the scene is copying it. To me, that's a worse offensive to artistic ouevre than kitsch... US 1 in Saugus has a certain charm and sense of wonder in it sadly declining level of tackiness and over the top commercial roadside architecture of the 1950s (the Leaning Tower of Pizza, the former Ship Restaurant in the shape of a concrete ship--lost some of its size a few years ago alas, the fiberglass cattle herd and giant fiberglass Saguro of The Hilltop Steakhouse, and other such sites. Now, alas, the newer buildings are for establishments which have the national homogenization looks--Home Depot, Whole Earth Foods (or whatever the name of the chain that gobbled up small local and regional health food stores and chains, and apparently has a bad reputation as regards its own policies...), standard generic office buildings, and blah and bland and just like everywhere else including those horrid postpostmodern buildings that taken the 1960s and 1970s box and put those utterly stupid pink and green peaks ontop of them, and scatter the stupid ugly buildings around inside a mass of asphalt paving. UGH! )

- the stereotyped character,
- the stock description,
- the repeated phrases within an author's writing
- euphemisms or huhs?! in intimate scenes
- situational cliches

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

Rock 2

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.

A lot of stuff is in the eye of the reader--the classic example is someone saying that a book is like an inferior copy of a modern work or works by a contemporary writer or writers, when the situation is that the book that they're referring to, is the one that the modern works were copying/borrowing from/imitating/riffing off of.

Ironically, the surviving ancient Greek plays considered to be masterpieces, were mostly written with sets of stock plots, characters, themes, etc. The audience expected to see Oedipus pluck out his eyes in Oedipus Rex, die in Oedipus at Colonus, the Furies pursuing Orestes in the Orestia, Prometheus being bound and an eagle eating his liver in Prometheus Bound, etc. The audience knew EXACTLY what things were supposed to occur as essential components in Greek theater when it was Oedipus they were seeing, or Antigone, etc. The writers had to work within the constraints of giving the audience the pathos and gore of Oedipus blinding himself, the moment when Oedipus realizes he is a parricide who has married and had children with his mother, etc., following the expected sequence of events, while also presenting a fresh and uplifting version of the story that held the audience's interest--the audience knew the story down pat, knew the start, knew the end, there were surprised regarding the plot, the plot was fixed, King Oedipus came to Thebes, killed a man, married the queen, she bore his children, and then comes the revelation that he's a parricide and married his mother, committing abominations in the rules of his society, for which there is no atonement possible that would allow him to stay in Thebes. Yet, Sophocles, Eurpides, and all those others wrote their particular versions, some of which have survived the intervening two plus millennia.

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

Rock 3

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.

The issue there is how does one describe the protagonist when the voice is first person, or narrator over the shoulder or inside the particular character's head? Many of the ways of doing it klunk majorly. The issue is dealing with a sticky point of how to convey information that putative narrator usually doesn't notice/point out/takes for granted. It gets worse when, in a series, the author either has used cut and paste on the computer, or cut and paste from memory, and sticks the same description in from one book to the next of characters [or near-duplicate sex scenes, unless the intention is to show a lack of imagination or a taste for routine on the part of the character as opposed to the author....]

[I have my own particular idiosyncracies/tastes regarding point of view, I tend to loathe the interior view where there is a judgmental narrator treating the reader as if the reader were the narrator, expecting the reader to react the way the narrator reacts and be in consonance with the narrator's viewpoint. It's even more annoying with a chatty narrator doing that.

Another annoyance is the sudden jump from 3rd person narration where the narrator is staying out of the story, to 3rd person narration where the narrator injects an opinion of a situation or tells the reader what's going to happen, I usually hate it when the narrator telegraphs Bad Things Are Going to Happen from This... I really do not want the narrator sticking his, or, or its (or their...) nose into me telling me definitely the result of what the character is doing to about to do. Not only does it throw me out of the story to have the narrator suddenly become an intrusive busybody, but I don't like being told that Bad Stuff is coming, if I can't figure it out myself that this bodes ill or could be bad news, I don't want to be told it by a narrator who to that point hadn't been playing e.g. Paarfi the narrator of Steve Brust's The Phoenix Guard/Five Hundred Years After/etc. set of books. (Paarfi is a massively instrusive narrator, but a significant chunk of the fun/charm of those books for me, was Paarfi's narrative voice--it was a consistent voice of nosy noisy intrusive narrator.)]