Cliches To Avoid Like The Plague?

That study is not only heavily flawed, it doesn't actually make the claims you say it does. Further, many, many marketing studies have been done by many companies. People like fresh, sure, but they don't want it to be too fresh. You don't maintain high sales by giving people entirely new stuff (the possibility of which is hotly debated), you do it by finding something they like and giving them more of it.


You may be aware that THG was often called a Battle Royale clone. That's not strictly true, but the fact that people made the comparison suggests THG isn't all that original. Here's the TVTropes page for THG: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheHungerGames

It's full of common tropes. Just full of them.




Worry less about cliches and more about writing your story.

justlukeyou said:

True but some books have huge hooks like Twilight or THG which sets it apart from everything else.

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Twilight was a romance, which is a genre that is filled with established tropes and expectations.

Yeah, vampires aren't supposed to sparkle, but that novelty was layered on top of much that was traditional and expected.

And the Hunger Games had plenty that was well established too. Plenty of dystopian futures where people have to fight each other to the death for entertainment, and plenty of stories where kids are trained and used as weapons.

If complete novelty and a lack of cliches was part of the almost guaranteed formula for success, then why would hollywood be so addicted to sequels and remakes, and why would so many successful tropes be repeated over and over various genres (and why would there be so many series, for that matter)?

Buffysquirrel said:

This is the actual paper: http://aclweb.org/anthology/D/D13/D13-1181.pdf

Note it doesn't say what the Telegraph says it says, which is unsurprising to those of us familiar with the British press.

Also, the methodology is suspect.

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Looks like it was focusing on writing styles in any case, not the actual presence or absence of tropes in the stories itself.

I can well believe that a fresh sounding voice or style can be appealing, especially when one is telling the same old stories...

It's one reason why they do remakes of movies in Hollywood too. New technology, cinematographic techniques, and new takes on characters can make us perfectly happy to see yet another version of the Three Musketeers, or a Kurosawa film (set in the wild west, or maybe in space, even) or even a remake of a remake.

justlukeyou said:

Sequels almost prove a business can make money and remakes because there is a lack of quality material out their.

What other books are there where people had to fight each other to the death or a young woman moves to a small town where vampires and werewolves live side by side?

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Books with vampires and werewolves:

The Mercy Thompson books (by Patricia Briggs) come immediately to mind, and they predate Twilight, btw. Much other UF too. Heck, there were even vampires and werewolves in the Wizarding World in the Harry Potter universe.

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/vampires-and-werewolves

I'm not sure why the small town aspect of Twilight would in of itself be what makes a world where vampires and werewolves both exist unique and special, but that's really the whole thing.

Nothing in that (or any other) book is unique in of itself, but it's a combination of factors that makes a story stand on its own.

Stories where people have to fight one another to the death or are hunted for sport for entertainment have also been pretty common, and for good reason. There are historic precedents (gladiatorial combat).

Rollerball
Death Race 2000
The Running Man
Battle Royale
Gladiator (and any number of other books and movies that feature gladiatorial combat in a historic or fictitious context)

Again, the uniqueness stems not from the trope itself, but in the specific ways it can be woven into a story and setting.

justlukeyou said:

True but some books have huge hooks like Twilight or THG which sets it apart from everything else.

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justlukeyou said:

Sequels almost prove a business can make money and remakes because there is a lack of quality material out their.

What other books are there where people had to fight each other to the death or a young woman moves to a small town where vampires and werewolves live side by side?

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How widely have you read in YA and SFF? Because neither of those books had particularly unique hooks, and there are many other books out there with similar premises and story-lines and tropes and etc. And if we expand into anime/manga/light novels, since we're including popular and well-known Japanese films/books and American comics(The biggest remake/reboot/sequel mill of them all), then I can expand on Roxxsmom's list by at least ten in each category you cite. As far as Twilight, there are literally hundreds of similar books and movies, many of which are quite popular just looking at the Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance genres in western commercial fiction.



Roxxs mentioned The Running Man which features adult characters, but King also wrote a YA version, called The Long Walk. There are tons of mediocre action movies with a similar plot. Battle Royale was published in 1999, with the movie coming out in 2000, was one of the ten highest grossing films in Japan, and was released in 22 other countries including the US. The movie was on several "Best of" and "Top [500, 100, 20, 50] Movies of all time" lists. It even had a movie sequel involving a rebellion, much like the later Hunger Games novels.



There is no actual secret to writing a popular book. Sorry.

Liosse de Velishaf said:

There is no actual secret to writing a popular book. Sorry.

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^Yes, this.

Reading this thread reminds me of the guy who claimed he had an entirely original concept/world/plot, and listed all the unique attributes... only for someone else to point out that every single one of those things had already been done, and weren't as original as the guy had thought.

Don't think of it as "original vs. cliche". If you do, you'll be dismotivated every time someone says "Hey, that sounds like _____!"

EDIT: And don't try to write a book with the sole purpose of it becoming popular. It shows. And it's not pretty.

There are tons of mediocre action movies with a similar plot. Battle Royale was published in 1999, with the movie coming out in 2000, was one of the ten highest grossing films in Japan, and was released in 22 other countries including the US.

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Yeah, I got annoyed at all the people saying the Hunger Games was just a Battle Royal knockoff, because I didn't think Battle Royale was all that original after watching too many B-movies from the 80s when I was a teenager that had a similar premise. And if you want to you can follow the thread back through the decades and centuries and millenia to the story of Theseus and the minotaur which has young tributes sent to participate as sacrifices in a murderous game within a heavily regulated arena i.e. the Labyrinth.

Taran said:

Yeah, I got annoyed at all the people saying the Hunger Games was just a Battle Royal knockoff, because I didn't think Battle Royale was all that original after watching too many B-movies from the 80s when I was a teenager that had a similar premise. And if you want to you can follow the thread back through the decades and centuries and millenia to the story of Theseus and the minotaur which has young tributes sent to participate as sacrifices in a murderous game within a heavily regulated arena i.e. the Labyrinth.

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Hunger Games was not a BR clone. But it was also not as original as was portrayed. I thought about bringing up Theseus, but previously the OP dismissed similar comparisons saying they weren't similar enough to count.


A lot of things can seem really creative if you haven't read widely in the genre in question. Isabel Allende's little genre mystery foray, for example.

Anyway, I just wanted to echo what Roxxmom said about characters getting knocked unconscious. I guess the way it's medically handled inaccurately bothers me less (though I guess it does bother me because people IRL then do not know how to handle it) then it's often used as a scene transition when the writer can't figure out how to end the scene. If you have a character who's knocked unconscious because they're chloroformed and kidnapped, then that's different from a character being overwhelmed at the end of a dramatic scene.

Like, I'm writing something where a character is knocked unconscious (well, actually, he faints and hits his head). However, I don't use it as a scene transition. Instead, it's foreshadowed by showing that the character is very sensitive to gore and then exposing him to a lot of it, and the true purpose of this is that his mother decides she needs to hover over him and takes him to her place to recover for a couple days and in those couple days his own home gets demolished. In this case, it has a function beyond just an easy scene transition.

I kind of think the "chosen one" is like that too. If you have a "chosen one" just because you need a character for everything to happen to and for the plot to get strung along, then you have something that's uninteresting. If the "chosen one" becomes a vehicle for something bigger than itself, then it's not really a cliche.

I also giggled when I saw this thread title because, you know, "to avoid like the plague" is a cliche

Taran said:

Yeah, I got annoyed at all the people saying the Hunger Games was just a Battle Royal knockoff, because I didn't think Battle Royale was all that original after watching too many B-movies from the 80s when I was a teenager that had a similar premise.

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The Running Man, to name just one. And several episodes of Start Trek TOS. It all kinda falls under the "futuristic Roman arena" concept, where people are forced to do battle for the amusement of the masses.

Roxxsmom said:

If you think the Matrix is the only recent work of spec fict that heavily draws on the chosen one trope, then you need to read and watch more SFF

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This is an important and insightful comment. Not only has it been done many, many time before, but protagonists who are the "Chosen One" can quickly become annoying because they are alienating to the reader: almost certainly every reader cannot identify with a "Chosen One" because we are ourselves are not chosen or special in any way.

It's a personal preference, but I much prefer characters who are normal, everyday people with the same values and sensibilities as me reacting to difficult, exciting, unusual situations. The "Chosen One" trope can come across as elitist, random or lazy.

Springs2 said:

I'm not sure being knocked unconscious is a cliche. The chosen one is but it doesn't mean it can't make for a good story. I've just been reading the Kingkiller Chronicles and Kvothe is a chosen one: I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

But I'm biased -I have a chosen one of my own.

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Kvothe isn't The Chosen One. He's the main character, he's a hero, but that doesn't make him The Chosen One.

As a beginning, sure. Not if the book is about dreams and how creatures from the main character's nightmares are coming to life.

/rebellious streak

justlukeyou said:

Certainly having the MC wake up from a sleep is one cliche to avoid at all costs.

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Ok, buddy, here's the deal. A cliché is just a trope that is extremely common and done badly. Tropes are part and parcel of any genre, and even subgenres have their own common tropes. Using tropes in an effective manner, is what keeps them from being considered a cliché. Yes, trope such as waking up from sleep are frowned upon in writing circles. But frowned upon does not equal forbidden by any stretch of the imagination.

A character waking up from sleep or unconciousness because they jumped off a cliff, can work as an opening if done right. So can a character waking up and then realizing they have wings when they go to the bathroom to start their day. Use the waking up trope to thrust the character directly into a dilemma and if executed well, it is not cliché.

Trope does not equal Cliché.

Samsonet said:

As a beginning, sure. Not if the book is about dreams and how creatures from the main character's nightmares are coming to life.

/rebellious streak

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Or a coming of age of an immortal, or someone with a hidden heritage they didn't know about. It's all in how you use it.

I would like to see someone start off with "It was a dark and stormy night..." and make it work. That'd be something.

how is simply being knocked unconcious a cliche?

snowpea said:

how is simply being knocked unconcious a cliche?

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It isn't in and of itself. It's just a trope in some genres.

I think a "cliche" is a trope that's overused and produces a groan from the audience. Getting knocked unconscious is a trope (at the very least) because it's an unrealistic, often-used plot thingy that happens.

I don't think that someone being knocked unconscious during a battle is a cliche quite yet. I was watching Game of Thrones the other day and got to the part where Tyrion is knocked unconscious and a whole battle scene is skipped right over, and I was like "oh, okay" instead of "goddamn that's annoying".

JMO.

I don't think we can - or should - try to avoid cliché altogether. Even within something as well-used as the chosen one has a variety of different variations:

King Arthur and Aragorn are chosen ones because of their lineage.

Neo and Anakin are chosen by a prophecy.

Katniss is chosen by her community (sort of).

Then we have the question about how people respond to their destinies. Do they deny it or embrace it?

How do other people around them respond to their chosenness?

I don't think it's enough to throw our hands up in horror at yet another chosen one. There is no reason why we can't take a theme like that and give it a new spin.

Angry Guy said:

I would like to see someone start off with "It was a dark and stormy night..." and make it work. That'd be something.

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The original use of this phrase was in a novel called Paul Clifford, which was written in 1830 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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And yeah, it's been the poster child for bad starters ever since.

However, Madeline L'Engle used "It was a dark and stormy night" as the opening line for her children's classic A Wrinkle in Time, so it has been used successfully at least once.

It was a dark and stormy night.


In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.

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I think you can avoid any potential eyerolls by just steering clear lf the term "chosen one". The concept itself is innocuous, it's the wording that makes people groan because at this point it's horrendously overused and makes you look lazy and unimaginative as a writer.

If all you want is to communicate that a character is special in some quasi-mystical way, there are lots of ways to do this. It doesnt always have to be the same old "ancient prophecy". A person might be special for astrological reasons. Maybe they were born on the same day a new star or a comet appeared in the sky. Or maybe something unusual about their birth was interpreted as an omen of future greatness (or, conversely, as evidence of a curse). In superstitious cultures almost anything can designate a child as special. Just be creative.