Department of Linguistics
Style Council Conferences
The cutting edge of obscurity
There's a war going on, a war against cliché. This is no mere skirmish. It's a fight to the death!
Did I say 'fight to the death'? Why is it that whenever I talk about clichés, they start pouring out of my mouth, like a raging torrent. Oh dear. Raging torrent.
It was Martin Amis who declared the war on cliché. 'All writing', he said, 'is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.' 1 And that, in a nutshell, is what I'm going to talk about today. Surely I didn't actually say 'in a nutshell'.
Clichés start out life fresh and fit to travel. Because they are apt and catchy, they are repeated. From such promising beginnings, they age badly, becoming stale prose, then tired similes and ultimately turning into dead metaphors. Whatever power clichés once had has leaked away from overuse by lesser writers over too many years.
Most first drafts need to be trawled for clichés. Why do literary critics and linguists and editors keep hammering away about them? How come writers don't get the point? It's hard work to write well, that's why. Few writers use cliché deliberately, but they are handy, the first thing the mind grabs and throws onto the page. It's easier than coming up with something arresting and energetic.
One of the exciting things about original writing is the opportunity it gives the reader to see something in a different way, through the eyes of the observant writer. The reader (sometimes the lucky editor) sees a brilliant image and thinks, 'Yes, that's just exactly right, that's just what it's like'. Sometimes the words fall together so compellingly that you marvel not that the writer has got it down on paper, but that it has never been done before.
By way of contrast (there I go again) , there are words that go together like—how can I put this? Like fish and chips. Like chalk and cheese. Like …
A bull at a gate
a motley collection
a towering inferno
a train of thought…
It's the known, the expected, the unoriginal. Don Watson compares the cliché to 'an old wheelbarrow or darned sock we can use over and over again; something with which we "make do"'. 2
The word cliché originates from a French printing term. The cliché was a metal plate, used to print an image, rather that text. This plate could be used over and over again. And it was. So, before a cliché became a cliché, it was a metaphor. In Cultural Revolutionary China, the People's Daily had ready-made hot metal character sets for political clichés like 'our-great-leader-and-teacher-Chairman-Mao'. They might as well have printed 'blah, blah, blah'. The separate words had become meaningless. It's the familiarity of the cliché that makes it into a conglomerate.
Most writers would be horrified to think that their work harboured a single one. But cliché doesn't only operate at the level of imagery. It also creeps into characterisation (the ugly criminal, the sweet innocent young girl who also happens to be breathtakingly beautiful). It rears its banal head in matters of plot and it is the staple diet (whoops) of genre fiction (the happy ever after ending of romance and the predictable racism of fantasy fiction's descriptions of humanoids or trolls).
Stereotypes sit uneasily in literature. As Anne Bernays discovered when she taught writing, 'The knowledge that people aren't always what they seem was a startling notion to more beginning students than I like to acknowledge. I thought everyone knew that a person who smiles all the time may very well have a troubled and even murderous heart.' 3 In my editing practice, I've had cause to comment to an author that it's enough for Rhiannon to be beautiful and blond, she doesn't have to be a platinum blond. Her eyes don't have to be gentle and aquamarine and her skin so flawless that she doesn't need make-up. Just blond and beautiful will do!
Another writer, seeking to put across the idea that a character was heartless asserted that 'he was a cruel man'. Less than convincing. A step up from telling is generally held to be showing. You want to demonstrate that a character is cruel? Then show him being cruel. Here, the ultimate cliché would be a flashback to the man's childhood habit of pulling the wings off flies. Heard that one before? To avoid clichéd characterisation, the editor might recommend introducing something unexpected. Instead of an action, what about an absence of response? Here's a possible scenario. A man takes his two-year-old daughter to the park. The child falls over and cuts her knee. She wails at the pain and sight of blood. The father ignores her. He has done nothing, but the lack of the expected human response to console a child in distress — especially a small child, especially his daughter — is all the cue the reader needs to infer characterisation.
What is the editor to do? The first line of defence (hmm) is to gather together the examples of originality in the text, the adjective–noun combinations that surprise and delight the reader. Even a mediocre manuscript will have a handful. They show what the writer can do. When they find a work that is heavy with cliché, editors can point out opportunities for deletion, simplification or substitution of fresher images.
Sometimes I appeal to their sense of adventure. 'Black as ink' is just what readers expect, I might say. Why not surprise them?
I have suggested to an author that to say 'hell for leather' and 'wet its whistle' is too much in one sentence. I've ventured that the first time a writer described someone's hair as a mop, it was an effective comparison. Not now.
There are very few good reasons to use cliché. But they exist. The possibilities include emphasising the banality of a character or a situation, or employing humour. Sometimes there's a case to leave a cliché or two in the dialogue. And there are authors who can toss a cliché onto the page and make of it a signal or a game. It can be like a knock at the door or a bell chiming—just about any passage of Gertrude Stein's writing uses set phrases knowingly, effectively. More often, these literary tics are accidental and they pull down the work.
If first drafts were perfect, editors would starve. A little humility is, ahem, in order, when picking other people's writing to bits. Most of us speak first draft, many of us write first draft, and the climate can be very drafty for editors who live in glass houses…
There is a kind of hierarchy of acceptability for cliché. HW Fowler said of the hackneyed phrase: 'all would be well if the thing stopped at the mind but it issues by way of the tongue, which is bad, or of the pen, which is worse.'
My favourite cliché came from a good manuscript which now gets five stars from readers on Amazon. The central character, whose life ends tragically, is still beautiful, young and happy. But even then, 'there were dark clouds looming on the horizon'. My comment? Not dark clouds! Not looming!! Not on the horizon!!!
1. Martin Amis, The war against cliché: essays and reviews 1971–2000, Vintage, Random House Australia, 2001, xv.
2. Don Watson, Death sentence: the decay of public language, Knopf, Random House, Milsons Point NSW, 2003, p. 76.
3. Anne Bernays, 'Pupils glimpse an idea, teacher gets a gold star', in Writers on writing: collected essays from the New York Times, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York , 2001, p. 26.
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