Story guru Syd Field was a student at Southern Cal in the 60′s, and there he encountered the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, son of the French impressionist master painter, Auguste Renoir, who had plenty to say about cliches…
Renoir hated the “cliché.” He would quote his father about bringing an idea into existence. “If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model…your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.”
How do you express the essence of a moment, the cleverness of a character in dialogue, the description of something momentous but common, etc. without sounding “cliched”?
There are two answers. Actually three…
(1) A shot of imagination that sends the cliche into a new realm. How? By using language to craft a “uniqueness” for it.
But if that isn’t happening…
(2) Go look at a real tree. Or go beyond a standard cliche phrase and look anew at the action or situation it it is standing for. Describe THAT tree. Or render THAT event, action, etc. objectively, in simple observational language anchored in reality. As if by magic, the cloying over-familiarity of it (“oh, I’ve heard this before–a thousand times”) — the annoying assumption of laziness, “taking the easy way,” is gone. You are showing the reader something new–something not seen before. A particular leaf. THAT particular leaf.
(3) If all else fails, try corrective surgery: use the cliche, but change one term of it–make up something imaginative, but appropriate to the style and moment of the story:
“Big as a house” becomes “big as a 747.”
“Dark as night” becomes “dark as Arctic midnight.”
See how the alchemy works? They’re no longer cliches. You’ve branded them: now they’re yours. (Hint: notice how in both cases the trick involved moving toward the more specific.)
By the way, none of the preceding will do you any good if you can’t recognize a cliche to begin with. It’s an awareness that can be sharpened. Try to become more and more adept at identifying the cliches in what you read (unfortunately, there will be no lack of them.)
