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 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.)]