The 5 Biggest Cliches About Writing
By Adam Krause
If creative writing is supposed to be about finding an original way to say something, why do people so often fall back on the same few tired phrases when telling other people how to do it? For every nugget of time-honored writing wisdom, there are a dozen great writers that have broken the rule and lived to tell about it. Here are five pearls of wisdom about what to do, and what not to do, when writing. Are these stepping stones to success, or a rock slide that will crush your creativity? You be the judge!
1) “Begin at the beginning.”
How many times have you heard this? It comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, during Alice’s mock trial, when the White Rabbit asks where he should begin in his testimony and the King instructs him to “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end, then stop.” The joke is that this advice is useless, because wherever the White Rabbit begins is the beginning, and wherever he stops is the end. Surreal advice from a character who has just told Alice that she is in contempt of court because she is two miles high has been taken as gospel by writing teachers and hard-nosed journalistic editors alike.
In fact, where to begin and where to stop are entirely up to the author, and they are two of the most complex and significant choices a writer makes. Do you start with a mysterious action scene and then jump backward in time (so that the second paragraph of your story uses the well-worn phrase, “It all started when…”) Do you begin with the character’s birth or, like Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane or Leo Tolstoy in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” with his death? Or do you just start your story with the character getting out of bed in the morning?
To take one example that clearly violates this “rule,” Martin Amis’ novel Time’s Arrow begins at the end and goes backward. The narrator perceives time in the wrong direction, so that he goes to the grocery store and receives money before putting everything back on the shelves, and he sends his emergency-room patients out looking worse than when they came in. This fundamental mistake, which continues through the entire novel, proves to be poignant when the role he played during the Holocaust is revealed.
Whatever beginning you ultimately choose for your story doesn’t have to be the part you first get down on paper. Plunge into what interests you most, and perhaps once you’ve made it to the end, you will see the beginning in a different light.
2) “Avoid clichés like the plague.”
This is a coinage of recently deceased right-wing New York Times columnist William Safire. It is taken as good advice, with the self-deprecating twist that it is itself wrapped inside of a cliché. Of course, we wouldn’t still be repeating it if that cliché weren’t attached to it to make it memorable.
The word “cliché” has the same origin as the word “stereotype”: a printing shortcut. When type was set one word at a time, it was convenient to combine oft-used phrases into a single block, so that you could just stamp “A penny saved is a penny earned” into the middle of your pamphlet or broadsheet and move on. Ironically, to become a cliché in the modern sense, a phrase has to be striking and original the first time you hear it. (Or the tenth time: I still think I’m being witty whenever I say “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.”)
So clichés aren’t bad writing on their own, they’re just mechanical. You should indeed avoid them, for the same reason you stay away from plagiarism: it may be harder to come up with your own quotable, memorable distillations of complex ideas, but there’s more satisfaction and glory in it than when you swipe someone else’s phrase. The greatest honor your fresh, creative aphorism could be paid is to become a cliché some day. Then you can laugh at everyone else who uses it. As the unarguably original painter Salvador Dali put it: “The first man to compare the flabby cheeks of a woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was probably an idiot.”
3) “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
This quote has been attributed to Confucius (who never, as far as we know, said anything of the kind) as well as to Napoleon Bonaparte, who wanted a clear report from the battlefield and said impatiently to one of his generals, “A good sketch is better than a long speech.” However, its modern phrasing comes from neither of these sages but from a 1921 advertising campaign to put ads on the side of streetcars. It makes sense that the originators of this philosophy would be in the business of selling pictures.
Why a thousand words? It’s not that many: a little longer than the average newspaper column, a little shorter than this windy blog post. I’m sure people have tried to do a conversion of sorts, typing out thousand-word descriptions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon On the Island of La Grand Jatte, and I’m sure these compositions have fallen short of the original painting’s arresting power. Great painting gives the impression of the universe frozen at a single significant moment, and great writing, by contrast, seems to flow seamlessly from one moment to the next, part of an endless Scheherazade-like story. It’s hard to reconcile the two art forms, though more and more cool graphic novels are doing it (check out Eduify’s recent graphic novel post!)
If you want to turn your words directly into a picture, try Wordle. It will turn any block of text, no matter how long, into a cloud graphic of your most prominently occurring words. Then you can decide for yourself how many pictures your words are worth.
4) “Show, don’t tell.”
There is definitely some truth here. The essence of the statement – that information is more likely to move and interest a reader if it is described in tangible, sensory details or dramatized through character actions, so that we can draw our own conclusions from the evidence at hand – is good advice for writers who need to be reminded to fully imagine the world they want to convey. A sentence like “Riding at the back of the train car is exciting” contains the same opinion as, but is less gripping than, this sentence from Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road:
“The way for a man to ride was erect and out in the open, out in the loud iron passageway where the wind whipped his necktie, standing with his feet set wide apart on the shuddering, clangoring floorplates, taking deep pulls from a pinched cigarette until its burning end was a needle of fire and quivering paper ash and then snapping it straight as a bullet into the roaring speed of the roadbed, while the suburban towns wheeled slowly along the pink and gray dust of seven o’ clock.”
However, don’t take the advice too literally. Sometimes the author does need to frame things for us, move quickly through stretches of time from one interesting scene to the next, or convey a large idea in a character’s thoughts that may not have a physical detail it can be linked to. All these are versions of “telling,” which can be its own art. Consider this sentence from the aforementioned story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” by Tolstoy: “Though his salary was now higher, the cost of living was greater, besides which two of their children died, so that family life became still more unpleasant for Ivan Ilyich.” That the deaths of two of his children is the second grievance listed in that sentence, less important than inflation, seems a shocking understatement. But it gets our attention and drives home Tolstoy’s point that Ivan Ilyich is a man who puts financial advancement above everything truly important. Moreover, its deft irony relies on its very refusal to engage our imaginations: it would be impossible to create the same effect if Tolstoy wrote two long, weepy scenes of children succumbing to nineteenth-century diseases.
Keep your language interesting and your story moving at an expedient pace. “Showing” and “telling” are different ways to meet those challenges, and writers need to have both in their toolboxes.
5) “Write what you know.”
Probably no quote has done more to stifle imagination in beginning writers than this one. It is usually interpreted as advice to stick to autobiography: subjects from your childhood, or what you did last weekend. Or perhaps to expand your range of first-hand experience – skydiving, sea voyages around the world – for purposes of writing fiction about it.
Trying to make your life more interesting just to fuel your fiction is rarely a good idea, and while many great careers have been founded on autobiography and memoir, you can also write a story that combines a bit of experience with a lot of imagination. Margaret Atwood looked around at societal limitations on women, and extrapolated a terrifying future society in The Handmaid’s Tale that took these trends to their logical extent. Patrick O’Brian, who lived all his life in the twentieth century, wrote twenty novels set during the Napoleonic wars. Through research, you can add almost anything to the category of “what you know.” The rest is imagination, whether plotting out a dystopian universe or just imagining how your characters think or what they would do in a given situation. Give your fictional creations the same range of emotions you have gone through yourself, and you will always be writing what you know.
