Last week I talked about originality and authenticity, but just because writers don't have to worry about coming up with an original idea, doesn't mean that we are immune to cliche.
TV TROPES
Of course, you can go to TV Tropes and see just how popular a particular idea or trope is by how many entries are listed. While this will give you some idea, it's not always a good indicator of what ideas are tired and which ones are vastly popular because they are tapping today's zeitgeist.
READ
As Stephen King (and many others) said, to be a good writer you have to be a reader. Reading around the genre you're writing in will really help you know what's trending and what's beginning to feel played. Of course, everything that you'll find in the bookstore and the library has been published, so on some level it's passed minimum requirement for originality (yes, even zombies and vampires - see zeitgeist). If you want to take your reading to the next level:
READ SLUSH
Reach out to the editors of your favorite independent genre zines. (you are reading them already, right?) They always need slush readers. There is no better way to become familiar with what's being done, and what's being done to death. If you don't have the time for that kind of unpaid extracurricular activity, there are a couple excellent resources out there.
STRANGE HORIZONS
Things We've Seen Too Often
Here are just the first four items on Strange Horizons' excellent list:
- Person is (metaphorically) at point A, wants to be at point B. Looks
at point B, says "I want to be at point B." Walks to point B,
encountering no meaningful obstacles or difficulties. The end. (A.k.a.
the linear plot.)
- Creative person is having trouble creating.
- Writer has writer's block.
- Painter can't seem to paint anything good.
- Sculptor can't seem to sculpt anything good.
- Creative person's work is reviled by critics who don't understand how brilliant it is.
- Creative person meets a muse (either one of the nine
classical Muses or a more individual muse) and interacts with them,
usually by keeping them captive.
- Visitor to alien planet ignores information about local rules, inadvertently violates them, is punished.
- New diplomat arrives on alien planet, ignores anthropologist's attempts to explain local rules, is punished.
- Weird things happen, but it turns out they're not real.
- In the end, it turns out it was all a dream.
- In the end, it turns out it was all in virtual reality.
- In the end, it turns out the protagonist is insane.
There are 51 items on this list. Read them all. It's a class in itself. In the end, this list isn't so much about overused thematic tropes as it is about the multitude of pitfalls that a newbie writer can fall into.
THE TURKEY CITY LEXICON
The Lexicon grew out of the Turkey City Workshop to give attendees a common language for critique. Learning how to talk about writing techniques is an important developmental step. The items on this list illustrate the kinds of missteps that, when embedded in your prose, will give your story a hackneyed feel no matter how brilliant the other elements might be. Entries include:
Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: A cheap technique for false
exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a
fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior.
“Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride
exotic steeds that look and act just like horses.
Dischism: The unwitting intrusion of the author’s
physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the
story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their
characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the
Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this
is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within
the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome.
As far as thematic cliches, sometimes they can feel like a gauntlet thrown down, and I'm all for bucking the system. If you're going to try to spin gold out of a leaden trope, you'll have a better chance if you'r familiar with what you're up against. And, if you bring your most original, un-cliched writing to bear on your story, you might be able to write something that is the exception to the rule.
A spar can be the mast of a ship (also what two people do when they go through the motions of hand to hand combat – similar to the kind of motions she and the alien are relentlessly going through as well).
Johnson includes a couple lines of poetry, which I recognized as Shakespeare. At first I thought they might be taken from The Tempest. Thanks to the Internets it was easy to track down. They're from
Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
It's clear that the entire poem informs Johnson's story on many levels (more than I'm glossing here).
Looking at the sonnet, the only concrete images in it have to do with seafaring:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark (i.e. lighthouse)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
And,
It is the star to every wandering bark (i.e. a small boat – something like a lifeboat…)
Here love is described as constant but also distant, untouchable. Like dead Gary or the idea of him or her last image of his body frozen in space.
The sonnet backs into its topic with a negative:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
And Johnson, begins by describing what the alien is not:
“The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal.”
The middle of the sonnet describes what love is (the pole star, a light house, unmoving and distant)
The final couplet is a strange negative statement, which is a little harder to parse. (Does it proclaim his love since the poem stands as proof that he did indeed write/love? Is it an admission that his feelings have changed and therefore are not constant and he is no longer in love? Is this a poem of illicit love to his male lover and the last couplet serves as a kind of plausible deniability?)
Regardless of how you read it, it’s the same negative positive negative binary pattern that’s all over Spar."
Check out Anaea's reading of this one here.
If you're trying to become a better writer consider "critiquing" the very best stories you can find. Come on over to the Craft Crucible and join the conversation!