Cliches

[Jewel101]

Are there some cliches you just shouldn't play with? For example, elves living in forests and being exceptional at the bow. Does it turn readers away if you have elves living in caves and exceptional at kung fu? Must an elf be tall and thin, or short and small? How about the pointy ears?

I enjoy reading cliches, I don't know if I'd get mad because my dragon isn't scaly. Do majority of the readers prefer pure cliches instead of a tampered one?

What do you think about changing cliches?

[aspiringwriter]

Well there are so many I can't begin to name them off. Take horror movies for example (off topic I know) but there are SOOOO many cliches in horror, yet filmakers keep churning them out and no one seems to mind... :)

[Torgo]

Maybe don't call them elves if they're cave-dwelling kung-fu-fighters. Me, I don't like to read a book and find refugees from Tolkien elfing and dwarfing all over the place - it all feels so second-hand. Some people do like to read Tolkienesque fantasies, but it never hurts to be original.

There are of course many different kinds of elves in folklore - you could have a look at Wikipedia on this.

Michael Swanwick has written a brilliant, cynical, dark book called "The Iron Dragon's Daughter" in which there are indeed Tolkien-like elves, only they're complete bastards, in the way I'd always suspected. The dragons are made of black metal and are like very old, callous, powerful Stealth Bombers - again, I think he's nailed it.

[rich]

I'm taking your definition as more of an overused idea than an oft-used phrase. For you to bring this up means that you have concerns about how much you're boiler-plating. If you have those concerns it usually means you're drifting into either laziness or a lack of conviction.

[alanna]

I don't mind people playing with cliches personally. In fact, I think a kung-fu learning elf would be pretty neat! But it's your world to create, so you have to decide what you think is permissable.

[Jamesaritchie]

Are there some cliches you just shouldn't play with? For example, elves living in forests and being exceptional at the bow. Does it turn readers away if you have elves living in caves and exceptional at kung fu? Must an elf be tall and thin, or short and small? How about the pointy ears?

I enjoy reading cliches, I don't know if I'd get mad because my dragon isn't scaly. Do majority of the readers prefer pure cliches instead of a tampered one?

What do you think about changing cliches?

I don't think of these things as cliches. They're part of tradition. Part of the myth. Which does not mean they can't be overused and become boring to many readers. But it's whether or not you bring a new ingredient to the brew that matters. Old hat is always tiresome to many readers, but some juse don't seem to care.

[alaskamatt17]

In my current SF trilogy I wanted to use but bend as many cliches from high fantasy as possible.

Here's a list of the cliches and their counterparts in my book:

A prophecy about a "Chosen One" -- one of the characters seeds his own children with self-replicating nanobots that will, in the far future, alter the DNA of one of his descendants to make an exact replica of himself.

Meeting in the tavern -- one of the early scenes involves all the heroes of the story gathering in the galley of their starship. No mead, though.

The light shining down on the hero as he holds his weapon aloft -- he has to. He needs to recharge his pistol, and only sunlight can do that.

Instead of rangers I have genetically engineered Allosaurs that roam the jungle protecting the less violent creatures of the Empire.

Prophetic dreams -- one of the characters has nanbots in his brain that allow his mind to be accessed from afar while he is in REM. Another character with more knowledge of the world than him transmits advice when he's sleeping.

Artifact of power that only one person can wield -- Orion's Key was an ancient military project keyed in to its maker's genetic code. A certain main character happens to be a descendant of it's maker, and happens to have had nanobots altering his DNA from the time he was in his mother's womb.

Dwarves -- there is a race of isolated dinosaurs that dwell underground in a desert that was blasted into glass by weapons testing. They collect artifacts from the time of human colonization, and tinker endlessly with the forgotten technology.

There are more, but I can't think of them all just now.

[LightShadow]

That's why shaking up the cliches makes good reading. Elves in caves that know Kung Fu. Sounds like a heck of a premise. Who says books have to follow cliche rules?

[Datoen]

I think it's all in your characters and in your story. Sure readers are expecting a certain thing from their writers. You pick up a fantasy book and you expect to find a fantasy setting. Some purists are going to want their elves tall, thin and with a green tint to their pale skin and the dwarves to be short, fat, eat alot and drink alot and be comedy relief. If they pick up the book and find a short, round cigar chewing elf dressed in a trench coat and solving crime....they may be turned off.
But others may find that a "fresh new angle. Something new!"
That is what is hard about the entertainment industry. Finding out what the money spending human wants to be entertained by. It can be a crap shoot.
But you can hedge your bet by having deep, well thought out characters interacting in a rich story with an interesting plot.
Good luck to us all.

[LightShadow]

I think it's all in your characters and in your story. Sure readers are expecting a certain thing from their writers. You pick up a fantasy book and you expect to find a fantasy setting. Some purists are going to want their elves tall, thin and with a green tint to their pale skin and the dwarves to be short, fat, eat alot and drink alot and be comedy relief. If they pick up the book and find a short, round cigar chewing elf dressed in a trench coat and solving crime....they may be turned off.
But others may find that a "fresh new angle. Something new!"
That is what is hard about the entertainment industry. Finding out what the money spending human wants to be entertained by. It can be a crap shoot.
But you can hedge your bet by having deep, well thought out characters interacting in a rich story with an interesting plot.
Good luck to us all.Such a well thought out, crisp, intelligent reply. New here? I like your attitude. It's quite professional. I tend to get a little jokey sometimes, but I like to tell it like it is, and honestly, anything is good if it's presented properly . . . essentially what you said!

[Saanen]

If you rework a cliche so that it's original to your writing, it's no longer a cliche. Every writer should attempt to do this!

[reph]

If you want one class of characters to be elves except that they don't live in forests, can't shoot arrows, and don't have pointy ears, you can create characters that live in the desert, use blowguns, and have fringed ears, and you don't have to call them elves.

[Thekherham]

I enjoy reading cliches, I don't know if I'd get mad because my dragon isn't scaly. Do majority of the readers prefer pure cliches instead of a tampered one?

What do you think about changing cliches?


I like cliches, as long as they're not the ones that have been done to death.

And about a non-scaly dragon? I've written about a dragon with fur, but then you can make a dragon anything you want it to be.

[maestrowork]

Cliches are bad if you lose originality and your writing is lazy.

[AdamH]

Do majority of the readers prefer pure cliches instead of a tampered one?

What do you think about changing cliches?


I think you'll be as likely to find a reader that hate cliches as those that don't mind that they're tampered a little bit. But there are some well established character cliches that are untouchable because they're so ingrained in the world's psyche. Santa Claus is one example. If you're writing a story on Santa, it would be hard to get a reader to buy that he's a leader of a renegade bike gang in southern Arizona. Not impossible but there wouldn't be a lot of people that would accept that without a shout out to the original Santa.

I'd figure you're safe playing with general characterization cliches. The more specific the cliche the more taboo the tampering. It's easier to accept that an elf might be short than it is for a story where the Grinch is actually purple and a dinosaur. So make you're dragon scaleless. If all dragons had scales, that would be like admitting that all people had blue eyes.

[Mistook]

A few months back, I started a thread on originality, and the overriding sentiment was that originality was a bad thing. It was a vice, not a virture, and to be avoided by any writer who wanted to get published.

Since then I've seen many of those who were in the anti-originality camp, make little posts here and there about how they secretly prize originality.

It seems that if you throw it in their face - "ORIGINALITY!" - as some kind of cause, then everybody reacts against it. They all run to the safety of the known and taut the virtues of convention. But if you trumpet the virtues of cliche, and convention, the same people will give a shout out to originality.

I guess the truth is, readers fear the unknown as much as they loathe the familiar. Find your own middle ground, and when you do... don't trumpet it from the rooftops. Just slip it under the door and walk away.

[aruna]

That's why shaking up the cliches makes good reading. Elves in caves that know Kung Fu. Sounds like a heck of a premise. Who says books have to follow cliche rules?

Probably they are Chinese elves. And Indian elves would be doing Yoga.

[WVWriterGirl]

To be quite honest, I'll pitch my tent in both camps on this issue.

When I'm in the mood for a little "comfort reading", I want my elves to be cliche...I want what I expect from an elf, or any other character type that I'm familiar with.

When I'm ready to make a few waves, though, I'm glad to see as much innovation and originality as the author wants to impress upon me.

There are enough examples of cliche in fantasy floating around out there that I don't need to cite any. However, if you're looking for originality in the fantasy genre, I suggest taking a look at the Drew Hayes comic book Poison Elves. He's created a lush, rich world, and the elves are...not what you'd expect.

Check out this website - http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/9923/poison - for a review of the early comic back in 1995, and this one - http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/brad/pe/p.elves.html - for a fansite with a little further information on the elf everyone loves to hate.

WVWG

[britwrit]

I don't know. Wouldn't Santa Claus be more of an icon than a cliche?...

I think with cliches, it really depends on which audience you're writing for. Way, way back when I was a heavy fantasy reader, to be painfully honest, there was nothing I liked better than (a) a 13th-generation Tolkien clone, or (b) a novel that could have come straight out of my D&D campaign. Yes - I loved adventure, as long as it didn't take me anywhere new...

[Saanen]

[QUOTE=britwrit]I don't know. Wouldn't Santa Claus be more of an icon than a cliche?...QUOTE]

I think the confusion in this thread comes from the word cliche. I interpret cliche as it's defined in the dictionary: "A trite phrase or expression; also the idea expressed by it" and "a hackneyed theme or situation" (according to Webster's Seventh New Collegiate). Many people seem to be interpreting cliche in this case to mean trope, which is more of a thematic convention. Tropes in fantasy include "reluctant hero" and "evil threatens the world of good," but I don't know that I'd include tiny details such as "tall elves" in a list of fantasy tropes.

The details are up to the author, always. If you believe that your elves must be tall and noble because elves in all the other books you've read are tall and noble, you're being sloppy.

All the examples of "going against the cliche" I've read in this thread--yes, even the Santa one--could be made into excellent stories in the right hands. Don't underestimate your readers; they're not going to stop reading your book solely because your elves are bright blue, four feet tall, and set fires for fun.

Edit: I also fully admit that many tropes can be cliched, but not all cliches are tropes.

[scarletpeaches]

I avoid cliches like the plague.

[rich]

Ah, but that itself is a cliche.

Try avoiding them like petting a cub in grizzly bear country, or trying to tickle the belly of a nervous skonk.

[Nakhlasmoke]

I am turning a well established cliche on its head in one of my books, and I have had both positive and negative feedback.

Personally, I like what I'm doing, and much of the novel centres on this inversion.
To try and switch to a more conventional image now, would mean writing a different book.

So the cliches that bug me usually involve princesses dressing up as princes, and going out into the big, bad world where they learn that evrything they thought they knew is wrong.

And really rich, good looking, well dressed vampires - we only have their word on it.

And yet, I still play with these ideas.

[scarletpeaches]

Ah, but that itself is a cliche.

I was being ironic.:Shrug:

[jackie106]

If you want Shaolin elves, use Shaolin elves. Just find a way to make the reader believe--or want to believe--in your story. As a reader, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief if the characters, writing and narrative are good.

I avoid cliches like the plague.

I don't use no double negatives. ;)

Jackie

[Lenora Rose]

There's also, of course, the research angle. It's odd how sometimes, looking farther back -- or farther afield into new countries -- than most people bother to look can give you something unusual and fresh-sounding.

It means that rather than making arbitrary change for the sake of change, you can point to a source for your changes. Even if you don't point to a source in any obvious way, the feeling of authority and authenticity is there.

For instance, elves.

Living underground -- in Irish myth, the Tuatha de Danaan do just that in a lot of places. More under hills and/or barrows than under mountains, and certainly favouring places out of the humans' way (Ie, forested or otheriwse left wild). But underground.

Doing Kung fu - well, not exactly. However, for all our emphasis on Asian martial arts, European warriors were trained in weaponless hand-to-hand forms - and because the human body can only bend so many ways to make a good solid blow, some of it does indeed look like Kung Fu or Karate. There are a lot of training manuals still extant from the fighting schools in the Renaissance and Reformation, and some that are even older. There are a fair number of people trying to more accurately recreate the exact steps and forms.

You don't have to say that in the story. You can just have your elves show up from under the hills, chopping, leaping, kicking, and kicking A**.

OR:

If you want to uphold the standard line of forest elves with bows, too, looking around might also give you an idea why elves are so deeply associated with forest. This will let you add in touches that make it obvious you're not just putting elves in the woods because everyone else does, but because it's right and it fits.

[aruna]

Sometimes, avoiding cliches can become a cliche itself. Example: my first novel has a very strict Hindu father, who watches like a hawk over his teeanage daughter. He was actually based on someone I knew; in fact, he and his daughter were the inspiration for the whole book.
A reviewer once pointed out that the "dominating Indian father" is a cliche. So does that mean that in order to avoid the cliche I have to make him really hip and liberal? Then where's the story? SO no, I don't regret creating him the way he is; but I did try to give him dimensions that make him alive for the reader, so that in the end you can understand, sympathise with him, and even love him. Maybe this reviewer didn't end up liking him - she only saw the cliche, and I think that's a pity.
"Cliches" such as the one above exist for a good reason - it means that a majortiy of people in this cultural group CAN be observed to be that way; or, that people of this type have somehow impresssed themselves on our consciousness. Stereotypes don't arise out of the blue. SO too we can have cliches of organised Germans, fanatical Muslims, happy-go-lucky West Indians and so on - it's because we have seen and heard of such people enough for them to seem to represent their entire culture. To avoid these "like the plague" is completely unnatural; they do exist, and they can make great characters. What one should avoid is making them cardboard; thus my example above.
In my second book, I have a similar cliche: a German woman who lives by the plan. I lived in Germany and I know hundreds of people like this. It would be silly to avoid this type of character only because you're afraid of the cliche! So, she's as anal as you can get but she also has other dimensions to her; I show the fear and the inner insecurity which is the cause of her living by the plan, and I hope that makes her more three-dimensional.
SO I would probably use thin, sprightly elves with bows, but make them alive and really magical. It's cardboard cutouts we have to avoid, and a short fat elf can be exteremly thin in that respect.

Finally, it's creating full-blooded chaarcters that leap out of the page that counts; we need to see behind the facade to the real person beneath, feel and care about that person, love or loathe him or her. Then the cliche simply doesn't exist.

[Saanen]

I totally agree with you, aruna, and in fact you articulated some things that I hadn't really thought through. But your "cliched" characters were based on people you had actually met, people who conformed to certain stereotypes, while this thread concerns literary conventions about elves in fantasy. It's hard to argue that the stereotype of elves as tall, wise, and noble came to exist because many elves really are tall, wise, and noble. Instead of a cliche stemming from actual people and situations, we have a purely literary cliche. The most we can do as writers is to ignore what other writers have written about elves (unless we make a conscious decision to build on another writer's ideas) and go back to the source material of elves in folklore and myth. Either way, you're absolutely right that to make the cliche evaporate in the first place, we should make our characters into people the reader cares about.

[Anatole Ghio]

A few months back, I started a thread on originality, and the overriding sentiment was that originality was a bad thing. It was a vice, not a virture, and to be avoided by any writer who wanted to get published.


I remember that thread... my take on it was originality is ok, as long as the story works. Having the story work should be the number one goal, and originality should be a by product of that.

In terms of having a marketable story, it should be something the readers can recognize enough to encourage reading, but different enough to encourage excitement.

In terms of having a well crafted story, originality is fine, but then you have to ask yourself what audience you are writing to, and define how you will know if you were successful in reaching that audience or not.

[Anatole Ghio]

Now, as far as cliches go, my argument would be they are okay if they don't take the reader out of the story... in that case, you are probably dealing more with an archetype, than a cliche (ie, it is more a universal truth, than an overused trope).

Marshall Mcluhan once said that if you take two cliches and merge them together, you get an archetype... I think this would work just as well as a writing exercise. Take two cliches that have no business being together, and combine them for ironic effect.