So you’re writing a novel and you’re worried that the whole idea is just a cliche. Are you automatically nailed? Should you quit that book and start another one? What if that’s also based on a cliche?

Michael posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hey Randy,

So I hope I am not overloading you with questions, but you seem to be very knowlegable. I have been consuming your blog post with the fervor of a child eating cookies, but have noticed a lack of topics pertaining to cliches. It seems to me that cliches are numerous in fiction, and can be the untimely demise of an, otherwise, great novel. On the other hand, it would seem that certain cliches can be used to my advantage.

As an example, I have always been a fan of the coming of age cliche. It started with Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time.” The young teen coming of age is a cliche that has been used countless times, but is loved by many fans. How do I differentiate between useable cliches, and the old moth-chewed cliches.

Randy sez: Hi Michael, I’m glad you like my blog. I’ve been traveling a lot this fall, and haven’t had much time to blog. In late October, I made the difficult decision to move the hosting for the blog away from Hostgator (they just couldn’t seem to handle the traffic to my web site). My web developer moved my site to WPEngine, and the site has been rock-solid ever since.

Oops, “rock-solid” was a cliche, wasn’t it? Well, it did the job, and you know what I meant, but it wasn’t the most original way to say it.

And that’s the subject of today’s blog. Are cliches always wrong in fiction?

First, let’s define what we mean by a “cliche.” I use this word to mean a pithy phrase that’s so good that other writers copy it and turn it into part of the language.

If you read Shakespeare, you’ll see loads of cliches in his writing. Not because he was lazy. Because he was the first to use hundreds of pithy phrases, which other writers then reused forever.

Cliches are shortcuts. They save time, because you don’t have to think up some new way to say something.

The problem comes when you never do any original thinking. When you rely on cliches for everything. When you have absolutely nothing new to say.

No writer should do that. A writer’s job is to come up with original ideas. OR to present old ideas in original ways.

Now there’s one place where cliches most definitely belong in your fiction: When you have a character who’s a mediocre thinker, one way to show that is to have him use too many cliches. This shows the reader what the character’s like, rather than telling the reader.

“Show, don’t tell,” is a standard cliche in the world of fiction writing.

Cliches are supposed to be bad writing, because they lack originality.

Let’s be clear that readers aren’t reading mainly for “originality.” They’re reading mainly to get a “powerful emotional experience.” There are plenty of writers out there making a good living by giving their readers powerful emotional experiences, and using loads of cliches in the process.

Now let’s look at your question. You believe that the coming of age novel is a cliche. Personally, I would just call this a design pattern for a story. “Design pattern” is a term that came originally from architecture and then was adopted by software engineers.

A design pattern is an idea that recurs frequently, but can be redone in zillions of different ways so as to allow for some original thinking each time. In architecture, a door is one example of a design pattern. Doors are needed to let people move into and out of a room. Sure, you can buy a stock door from Home Depot and that takes no real thought. Or you can design it to be amazingly original. It’s up to you. So a door can be done in a cliched way, or not, depending on the architect.

I‘d say that the coming of age idea is similar. Sure you can do it in a cliched way. But you can also do it in a new, fresh way.

What this means is that the coming of age idea is not itself a cliche. It’s a design pattern.

There just aren’t that many original ideas. In fact, you can’t copyright an idea. What you copyright is the presentation of the idea. Because there are zillions of ways to present any idea, and it’s possible to be original in the presentation.

So don’t worry too much if the category or subcategory that you’re writing is a cliche. Worry first about putting in that powerful emotion experience. And then worry about presenting your story in a new and original way.

It’s a rare writer who can invent a whole new category. Tolkien did it, when he invented the fantasy genre. Tom Clancy probably invented the technothriller subcategory.

But most writers most of the time are writing in standard categories and subcategories. Nothing wrong with that.

Good luck with your writing, Michael, and have fun!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. Of course, I can’t possibly answer all questions, but I do what I can.

 

Awhile back, my friend Larry Brooks suggested to me that he and I and Jim Bell do a joint blog post on fiction writing. Larry is the author of Story Engineering and Story Physics and runs a popular blog at StoryFix.com. Jim is the author Plot & Structure and many others, and does business at JamesScottBell.com. And I am the author of Writing Fiction for Dummies.

Between the three of us, we’ve written several of the most popular books on the craft of fiction writing. So it makes sense to do a joint blog article.

Larry was the organizer for this, so the full blog post is on his site at StoryFix.

I’m posting just the first chunk of the blog post, to give you a flavor for what we came up with. Here’s the first question we tackled:

1.  There’s so much “butt-in-chair, nothing else matters” writing advice out there, and it’s creating problems for newer writers in particular.  If, in some alternate universe, you were asked to define the Holy Grail of advice-for-fiction-writers, the context-setting, everything-stems-from-this piece of gold… and you only got to chip in one answer, what would it be?  My guess is there may be more than one answer competing for this title… so if there’s no breaking the tie, please share those candidates, too.

Jim: Every scene needs an objective housed in the mind of the point-of-view character. Vonnegut said the character must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water. And then you must put obstacles in the way of that objective, or the scene becomes boring. Finally, the outcome of the scene should put the Lead in a worse spot—or maybe give a temporary gain followed by more trouble. Trouble is our business, so we need to make it happen. If the writer uses scene objectives that relate to the overall story question, then the novel has organic unity and feels like there’s forward motion.

RANDY: Success in writing comes from the following three-part formula, which you will repeat until you die:

1) Write fiction on a regular schedule that lets you predict how long it’ll take you to create your next project.

2) Get pieces of it critiqued frequently and apply what you learned to your writing.

3) Read from the recognized experts on the craft and marketing of your work and apply what you learned to your writing.

Why is writing regularly important?  I don’t put much stock in native talent.  I’m sure it exists, but you learn to write fiction the way you learn to play tennis – by doing it.

Why is getting critiqued important?  After all, there are hazards to getting critiqued.  We all have thin skins.  There are bad critiquers out there.  Despite these hazards, every writer desperately needs an outside opinion.  You won’t get better unless you know what the problems are in your writing.  The only writers I’ve ever seen that I considered hopeless were the ones who couldn’t accept critiques of their work.

Why is studying the experts important?  Because your critiquers can tell you what’s wrong with your work, but only a good teacher can tell you how to fix it.  There is no point in reinventing the wheel.  Learn from the experts.  Write better next time.

LARRY: A great story is never just about something… a place, a time, an event, a theme.  A great story is about something happening.

Write with courage.  Jump in.  But don’t jump out of the airplane without a parachute.  One with the words Principles of Storytelling Craft printed on it, visible from all points on the ground… where the readers are.

That was the first question. If you want to read the answers to all five questions, hop on over to Larry’s blog at StoryFix.com and have fun!

When you’re writing a novel in first person, how do you write exposition without it sounding weird and unnatural?

Vicky posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How do you write exposition from the first person without it sounding daft – unlikely the character would be thinking about how things work, she’d just know. I’m writing a fantasy, so some explainations are necessary – or aren’t they? Many thanks for your help.

Randy sez: Writing exposition in a novel always feels a little unnatural, because it breaks the reader out of the story. When you’re writing in third person, it may feel a little more normal. But it’s not that hard to do it well in first person.

There are a few principles that should keep you from the dangers of daftness.

1) Minimize the amount of exposition. When you think you need to explain something, ask yourself if the reader absolutely must have this explanation in order to understand the story. If so, then what’s the least you can get away with explaining?

Authors often worry about this much more than readers do. The reader usually doesn’t care, unless the story just plain stops making sense. Then a little exposition will go a long way.

2) Put the exposition in dialogue, if you can do that in a natural way. You can do this if one character knows something and another character doesn’t. If they both know it, then it doesn’t work.

Whenever you see the phrase, “As you know…”, consider that a red flag.

Your readers are going to mock you if you write something like this:  “Rapunzel, as you know, the two of us are twins and inherited a billion dollars from Great Aunt Daphne, who died last year at the age of 92, leaving us as the heirs and cutting Cousin Wilhelmina completely out of the will, which is the reason she’s been chasing us across Europe with a machine gun and a Dachshund, which is massively interfering with you completing your Ph.D. in philosophy and is keeping me from marrying my fiancee of seven years, Gretchen, who lives in Topeka.”

Dialogue should generally have conflict. If you’re going to use exposition in dialogue, consider making one character unwilling to give up the information, and make the other character have to work hard to get the info she needs.

3) If you really need to use exposition, then just do it. Suzanne Collins broke into a few paragraphs of exposition several times in The Hunger Games. Her character Katniss gave a two-paragraph first-person explanation of how the tracker jacker wasps were created by the Capitol. This came right at the point where Katniss discovered a nest of them and found a way to use them as a weapon. Here’s what she wrote:

Fear shoots through me, but I have enough sense to keep still. After all, I don’t know what kind of wasp lives there. It could be the ordinary leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone type. But these are the Hunger Games, and ordinary isn’t the norm. More likely they will be one of the Capitol’s muttations, tracker jackers. Like the jabberjays, these killer wasps were spawned in a lab and strategically placed, like land mines, around the districts during the war. Larger than regular wasps, they have a distinctive solid gold body and a sting that raises a lump the size of a plum on contact. Most people can’t tolerate more than a few stings. Some die at once. If you live, the hallucinations brought on by the venom have actually driven people to madness. And there’s another thing, these wasps will hunt down anyone who disturbs their nest and attempt to kill them. That’s where the tracker part of the name comes from.

After the war, the Capitol destroyed all the nests surrounding their city, but the ones near the districts were left untouched. Another reminder of our weakness, I suppose, just like the Hunger Games. Another reason to keep inside the fence of District 12. When Gale and I come across a tracker jacker nest, we immediately head in the opposite direction.

Collins needed to explain just how lethal tracker jackers could be. So she did. It worked. The above segment comes right near the beginning of chapter 14. It’s very smooth and clean — just enough info. Notice that it’s not done as if it were interior monologue. Katniss is stepping out of the story to explain it to you, personally, in a conversational voice. Then she steps back into the story and it resumes.

4) When you’re writing your first draft, just write the exposition and don’t worry too much about whether it works smoothly. Best to just get it down on paper. Later when you come back to edit, ask yourself how much of it you can throw away without confusing the reader. Get it right in the second draft, not the first.

More Resources for Writing First Person

Should Your Novel Be In First Person? What are your options and how do you choose between them?

Some Special Problems in Writing First Person How do you show what’s going on inside the other characters’ heads?

Perfecting That Pesky Point of View What if you want to write your novel partly in first person and partly in third person?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

 

So you’ve been writing a novel for a while and you suddenly realize that you hate everything you write. Is that normal? Is that bad? Are you going to die? Or are you a Great Suffering Artiste facing the customary doubts of all great Artistes?

Autumn posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi Randy.

I’ve been following your blog for just under a year now and your advice has really benefited me and helped me grow a lot as a writer in that time. So thank you very much for that!

My question is: what happens if you reach a point when you just hate everything you write? I’ve been working on my novel for a long time and I can’t get even five chapter in. Not for a lack of ideas or writers block. I can sit down and write for an hour or more and walk away feeling darn proud of myself. Then I come back to it later and I just hate it! It’s a complete 180. And recently I’ve been doing that with everything I write, not just stuff for my novel. Short stories that I write just for fun I’ve felt like crumpling them up and tossing them.

Is this a phase that all writers go through? I can’t give up writing, it’s in my blood and I have to do it. But I just don’t know how to handle this…

Thank you very much for your time.

Randy sez: This is an excellent question, Autumn. It’s one most writers ask at some point in their career.

I’ve met only a few narcissistic writers who never questioned the dazzling brilliance of their work. About half of them were extraordinary geniuses and the other half were irretrievably awful.

So are you really good or are you really awful?

There are several possible answers:

• You might be a terrific writer suffering from the usual “my writing sucks” doldrums that many terrific writers wallow in all their lives. (This is the price of writing that some very good novelists must pay and they never, ever get over it. They think they’re awful but they’re massively wrong.)
• Your editing skills may have outpaced your creative skills for the moment. This is not unusual and it passes with time, if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you might always be a better editor than creator. That’s one of the hazards you face in writing. It might just mean you’re a perfectionist.
• Your writing might actually be awful. Again, this is one of the hazards of writing. If you’ve got some talent as a writer, the solution to this is to get some training and some good critiques from people you trust and just keep developing your craft. In a year or five or a hundred, you’ll reach the level of craft you need to make yourself happy. Let’s remember that not everybody has talent, so there are no guarantees here, but hard work does tend to pay off.

Now which of the above is the real answer for you, Autumn?

There’s absolutely no way for me to know, because I don’t have a sample of your writing in front of me. Because of the extraordinary demands in other areas of my life, I only do critiques at writing conferences and in my local critique group. So I’m not the guy to tell you if your writing is any good or not.

But there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of good freelance editors out there who can tell you. And there are thousands of published novelists who could also tell you. (It usually only takes a page or two to know if a writer is really good. It only takes a paragraph or two to know if they’re awful.)

So Autumn, your homework assignment is to find somebody who can give you a good objective opinion of your work. If you’ve got a community college in your area that teaches creative writing, the teacher could probably do this. Most writing conferences have many faculty and staff members who can do a great evaluation. There are any number of freelance editors available online (a very few are listed in my blogroll).

If the only question you have is, “Is my writing any good?” then just about any of these folks could give you an answer pretty quickly.

If your question also includes, “How can I make my writing better?” then you would need to pick your evaluator with a little more caution, because not all critiquers are equally adept at all categories, so you’d want to look for somebody who “gets” your kind of fiction. (For example, I’m not all that good at critiquing romance or women’s fiction, but I know the suspense category cold and I can almost always pinpoint exactly how to fix a thriller.)

So get an expert opinion, Autumn, and keep writing. Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.