A review of Cliches

I hate cliches. Yeah, I'm sure I use them 9 times out of 10, like anyone who entertains themselves to be a writer, but I hate a lot of them. Especially ones that are cliches that don't happen enough to notice that they're actually there.

Take, for example, one of the classic cliches of television: the tertiary characters who know everything about everything. Sure, its hardly limited to television, but I can't think of one television show I've watched, especially dramas, where there isn't that one character who's off on the sidelines, waiting, biding their time to give the main character sage advice. Lost, first season had Rose, when she was wisely telling Jack that her husband, Bernard, was still alive. Heroes beat that one to death with characters weaving in and out of that plot line; Hiro's dad, for example, or even HRG for some characters. Hell, even kids shows have it. Think back to Power Rangers, Zordon was always able to come onto his little tube and give the Rangers the advice they needed. I know, I know, its necessary, and it advances the plot in a fairly easy way, and it isn't even the laziest writing, but it still just gets under my skin.

Checkov's gun, of all the cliches we've blown on this blog (and I mean "blown" as in "blow job") pisses me off because its the one that I see first. Its the easiest to miss, but it jumps out at me. Oh! There's a mysterious symbol on the wing of that plane you say!?! That couldn't be anything! This one's big in video games, Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a good example. Spoiler alert, your fairy friend, just like the other two fairies in that game, is mystical, and magical. Or almost any RPG, Tales of Symphonia is an easy one to take. You're told about Ex Sphere, about Lloyd's mom dying, and then that the nearby human plant is an Ex Sphere plant. You can figure out that the Ex Sphere Lloyd has is his mom in act 1. The only writer in recent memory that threw me with this one is JK Rowling, amazingly, in her use of the Invisibility cloak in Harry Potter.

I also hate that when you do avoid the cliche it becomes a cliche: Irony. Man bites dog. When you read it, you know that it sounds familiar, yet wrong. Then you realize: Its the opposite. There's nothing wrong, in the essence of it, of having this sort of narrative, I love irony, but I hate the fact that when you write, you get trapped in cliches. They're unavoidable. They've been impossible to avoid since man began to lie, as liars were the first storytellers. The first person who told the tale "I feel fine" when they really felt like jabbing a flint rock into their ear it bled and the ear drum punctured was first story teller.

I'm done ranting. But, I'm going to start a blog for ranting about writing and what is written now. Because I can, and I don't have enough blogs that I feel obligated to. Don't worry, though, anything I put there, with Alli's blessing, will be here too.