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?

[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.

[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.)]

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I quite liked Mallow myself, "Aye" and all. OTOH, reading all the erudite and thoughtful discourses on the nature and craft of writing have left me with the conviction that I'm never actually going to cut the mustard as a Fine Writer.

I've used the character-in-a-mirror/window trick; it bugs some people and doesn't bother others. In the interests of not repeating myself, I look for other ways to convey a sense of a viewpoint character. Particularly tricky in first person, of course, and the current book is in first person. At the moment, I've got the picture-of-the-heroine-as-kid on the mantlepiece, but I feel in my heart that's a cliche, too...

[jpsorrow.livejournal.com]

This little posting is interesting because the most recent review of my book claimed that some of the plot was cliched . . . mentioning that it's obvious from the first page that there was something big in store for the main character and that that was the cliche.

My response was . . . of course there's something big in store for the main character! If not, she wouldn't have been the main character! (The book is in the first person.)

But I mainly wanted to address the "person looking in the mirror" cliche. It's extremely hard not to do this when the book is in first person, as rolanni says. To get around this in my book, at one point I had someone staring at the main character after she'd stolen something, catching her in the act sort of. I had the main character think "what must this person see?" and then say what she thought he'd see, sort of describing herself.

But then later on in the book I had her see her reflection in water, so I don't know if that cancelled the first one out or not. *grin*

In the current book, same character, still first person, I had her find a picture of herself that someone she's romantically interested in had drawn. Again, seeing how someone else sees her.

[kalligraphy.livejournal.com]

The person looking in the mirror may be a cliche', however I think the story arc involving Janni Killian may be impossible to avoid that. Her physical changes involving the hybridization are an important part of who and what she is. It is kind of hard to convey those changes and the effects they are having on her without having some way for her to see those changes and comment on them in the narrative.

[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.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Why the obsessive need to describe the lead character at all? I think that's the biggest problem with the first-person-narrator-looks-in-a-mirror. The writer is stopping the story to tell us irrelevant information. If the information is relevant, it will show up in bits of incluing when it needs to.

I present as evidence Nine Princes in Amber. We are 2.5 chapters into the book before Zelazny tells us what Corwin looks like. Corwin has woken up with amnesia in a hospital, broken out of the hospital, and made his way to his sister's house--and this is no problem whatsover for the reader to follow without knowing what Corwin looks like. We get an idea what Corwin is like as a person, and the extent that we get a physical description is in his ability to fight. Corwin never has to say "I was a big, strong guy." He displays some physical prowess and we are left with an impression that he not small and wimpy.

The other crime writers commit is that too often the description is a dry, witness-describing-a-crime-suspect list. "He was 5'9" tall, a white guy with a tan, sun-bleached hair, green eyes, and stubble on his manly jaw." Oh, please. Shoot me now!

When Zelazny does tell us what Corwin looks like, it's much more than just a list of features. Corwin finds a set of Trumps, and seeing his own image is startling to him because of the context. The reader learns what he looks like, but also gets a million questions: What's with the cards? The otherworldly clothes? All these siblings? This is important! the whole scene screams, at Corwin and at the reader, and so the description is merely a tiny fragment of a much larger event.

So, in conclusion, it's not that a first-person narrator seeing themself in a mirror/window/puddle is a cliche (though it is). It's that the whole notion was flawed and pointless when the very first person did it. It was never a good idea. The writer should never stop dead in the middle of the story to tell the reader something irrelevant. If it's relevant, it will come out naturally.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Why the obsessive need to describe the lead character at all?

Because readers often want to know what a character looks like?

The other first-person novel I've written is a mystery. Along about the second chapter, Our Narrator, a reporter, shows up at the local town meeting to find the hall packed; standing room only, 'way at the back. And she comments that this is OK by her because she's six foot tall, overtopping the average local by a good three inches, and can see the selectmen's table at the front just fine.

Beta readers fell on their swords. If I was going to have something so unusual as a female character who was six foot tall (digression: Yr Hmbl Correspondent is a six foot tall female, so doesn't find the height all that unusual), then I needed to get that information before the reader immediately. Never did figure out how to do that, exactly. Did try to soften the blow to reader sensibilities by having another of the character's address Our Narrator as "High Pockets" early on.

All that lengthily said, you're right that the author shouldn't stop the story while pointless information is related at length.

[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.

[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.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'll ever be considered a Fine Writer, either. At times, this bothers me. Then I think about what I'm trying to do, and what I enjoy doing, and I realize that style and deathless prose aren't at the top of the list.

Maybe that should bother me. I don't know.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I've had Jani described by other viewpoint characters. I;ve had her describe herself in comparison with others. As [Unknown site tag] writes, Jani's appearance serves as a benchmark for her hybridization, and is something she monitors. It makes sense that she would gauge and compare. Look at herself in the mirror, and wonder at what she sees.

This little posting is interesting because the most recent review of my book claimed that some of the plot was cliched . . . mentioning that it's obvious from the first page that there was something big in store for the main character and that that was the cliche.

When it comes to plot, I think one reader's cliche is another reader's comfort read is another reader's only-type-of-story-I-like. Some folks would call Quest Fantasy a cliche. The Strange Coming to Grips with Her Strangeness (a fave of mine). I mean, pick any story arc, and someone will say they've already seen it a thousand times and they never want to see it again.

Add to that the fact that we write in genres where people read a lot of books over the course of a year. The most debilitating feedback I received about my fantasy came from a first reader who had just finished serving on a novel jury, She had read it all one hundred times over the course, and she was pretty merciless.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

As I said above, I agree with this. Thanks for saying it--it made me feel better. *g*

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I also like knowing what characters look like. Descriptions really don't stop the story for me--I tuck the details in my pocket and shoulder on.

In some respects, I am a very uncritical reader.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Because readers often want to know what a character looks like?

-->I dunno...I don't think that's true at all. I think they want to know if it is somehow important to the story, but otherwise it's just scene-dressing.

Oh, readers want some help--is the character male or female (or neuter or...) is generally at the head of the list. But that is usually inclued quickly.

It's when you get into the nitty gritty like what color hair does the character have. If it's important or somehow part of character (all the Weasleys have red hair), then yes, the author needs to say it. We know Harry Potter has green eyes and dark hair, but is he cute, handsome, or otherwise good-looking? Rowling never says. The main point she ever makes about his face is the scar (which is plot-significant), and that he looks like his father (which is characterization-significant, though also plot-significant in Prisoner of Azkaban).

From what you're saying about your 6-foot-tall woman, it may be that your beta readers are hypersensitive, or it may be that you didn't inclue it right. Not having read it, I can't say. (I will note that the idea of a 6-foot-tall woman would not startle me, but then I am 5' 10" and not the tallest of my female relatives. ;-) Your "High Pockets" reference sounds like exactly the sort of thing to give the hint. I do things like "Mary Lou glared up at her" to inclue a character is tall without ever having to say it in so many words.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

It's when you get into the nitty gritty like what color hair does the character have. If it's important or somehow part of character (all the Weasleys have red hair), then yes, the author needs to say it

On one side of the discussion, I recall the author of one write-that-bestseller book advising writers to keep the description of the protagonist to a minimum in order to allow the reader to project whatever appearance they preferred onto that character. It supposedly helped the reader bond that much more to the book.

That being said, I like some description. I'm a describer myself, very tuned in to features and appearance.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I used something along that line, too, before I found out it was used too much.

You write, you learn...

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

So, in conclusion, it's not that a first-person narrator seeing themself in a mirror/window/puddle is a cliche (though it is). It's that the whole notion was flawed and pointless when the very first person did it. It was never a good idea. The writer should never stop dead in the middle of the story to tell the reader something irrelevant. If it's relevant, it will come out naturally.

I like that. It's what I strive for...

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I like a hint or two, as well. I remember nebulously in the past reading a few books where you get no hint of what the narrator looked like--so of course I made up my own character. And then, suddenly 75% of the way through the book, something happens that tosses me out of the book. We get a descriptive hint, and it's something weird, and nothing about it has shown up so far.

I hate that. It's important, figure out a way to get it in.