I saw this video over a month ago via Bill’s site. Movie cliches are more noticeable because of their easy access and immediacy. Literary cliches, not so much, but they definitely exist and they can be just as horrid. Consider the meta-cliche, “It was a dark and stormy night.” A night was dark, you say?
And a few weeks ago Hot Space Station Justice clocked in at #3 with what to do with cliches in your story: delete them with extreme prejudice. On the micro, sentence-level this can be tough on your uppity yet frail writer’s ego because cliches can fit into sentences nicely and we think we’ve come up with something good. The facepalmity increases when you get to cliched character concepts. Hard-boiled government agent? Sexually-liberated foreign exchange student? Mustache-twirling villain? Delete it!
I don’t read a whole lot of genre fiction, and genres by nature have conventions that can become unreadable cliches if writers aren’t careful. At the risk of adopting the “open-ended question at the end of the blog post” maneuver, what are some of the worst offenders in the cliche category for your favorite genres? I mean besides the obvious hunky romance novel protagonist. Something deeper (if cliches can be deeper), less obvious, a more insidious violation. Go!