AVOID This Writing TRAP Like the Plague

In this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena talk about three traps writers often fall into when writing–and how to avoid them like the plague. Make your good writing GREAT when you put these tips into practice.

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Episode 62 transcription:

[00:00:17].930] - Gena
Hi, and welcome to the Writing Momentum podcast. I'm Gena Maselli, and this is my husband, Christopher Maselli. Hey. And we're here to talk about avoid this writing trap like the plague. And we are talking today, Chris, about this writing trap that sneaks in just about any writing.

[00:00:36].720] - Chris
Yeah, this is a writing trap that you will see so often that you might say, Wow, that seems like a cliché. And that's because it is. That's exactly what we're going to talk about here. This writing trap is cliches, but cliches maybe aren't entirely what you think they are. How would you define a cliche, Gena?

[00:00:54].520] - Gena
I would define a cliche as anything that is written that, and we're talking about writing here, so I'm going to limit it to that. Anything that is written that has been used so much that it has lost its punch and have even caused people to roll their eyes.

[00:01:13].140] - Chris
That's a good way to look at it. Something that makes you roll your eyes because you've seen it so many times. So for instance, this makes me think of when I was a judge with the writers digest for a while, and one of the things I was a judge for children's picture books. And I received literally hundreds of children's picture books that people had sent in for the contest. And then I had to judge them and say, Here's the ones who win, here's the ones who don't. And what I was surprised with was how many common things that I saw among those manuscripts. And one of the biggest ones was the cliche, the cliché of Once Upon a Time. We grew up, many of us, with books that started with the words Once Upon a Time. And so when we write our children's material, we want to start like that. But those words have become a cliché. By starting your book with Once Upon a Time, unless it's like a fractured fairytale that's trying to make fun of that genre, it doesn't really work anymore because it's been done so much. So if you're writing a children's book, you don't want to start with words like that because they become a cliche.

[00:02:24].640] - Chris
And that could be said for, I think, for a lot of words that you put individually in a book. If you're having characters talk and in their dialogue, they're saying things that are cliches. It's okay once in a while, but if you do it too often, it becomes cliche.

[00:02:42].270] - Gena
It becomes cliche and it loses its punch. Chris is talking about children's books, but this is in all writing. This can be in non-fiction as well. One of the ones that has become very popular right now that every time I hear it, I just cringe on the inside is when a speaker or a writer tells me they're going to unpack something. I've gotten to the place where I'm like, okay, I loved that when it first came out, but that's about 10 years ago and we need to come up with a new way of saying it. Another one would be for the non-fiction writer, the advice that we've been given, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, or you've gotten out on the wrong side of the bed in the morning. This is our job as writers to come up with a new way of saying what maybe has become a cliché.

[00:03:33].780] - Chris
To be more creative. It's been said like this a hundred times before. How can I say the same thing but in a new and fresh way? Sometimes you'll see that the books that strike you most, the lines that strike you most are the ones that are necessarily completely original, but the ones who say something that you know and agree with deep down inside. But they say it in a way that you never quite thought of it that way before. You've never heard a phrase that way before, and it sticks with you.

[00:04:07].560] - Gena
That's the thing that really grabs you. And I think it's that unexpected because sometimes if you're talking about something or you're writing a scene or you're writing a chapter or you're writing an article or a blog post, the thing that will really resonate with people is the unexpected. It's that it's taking something where they think they know where you're going and then you flip it on its head, or you twist it in such a way, in some fresh way that makes people go, Oh, I never thought of it like that before.

[00:04:37].770] - Chris
And so this happens a lot with individual words, but it can also happen in scenes. There are scenes that we put in our books that are cliche, and these also show up in movies and movie scenes. So what's an example of a scene that you would say, man, that is totally a cliche?

[00:04:57].020] - Gena
And I will put a little bit of a disclaimer on this to say that some of the most popular movies or companies that produce movies live on cliches. They have made a whole genre on cliches, and that is okay. That's their model. That's their genre. That's what they've created and that's what they're doing. But I automatically think of the meet queue in the movie where the girl has got something super heavy in her hands and she turns and she, of course, bumps into the billionaire because she's the overworked woman and she hits the billionaire and loses all her packages or whatever. And he sits there and helps her to gather them all up. And then they have this moment where they lock eyes and they have this connection. I admit, I watched some of those movies myself and they're fun. But that is a cliche.

[00:05:59].010] - Chris
It's a cliche. And I think the reason it's a cliché is because everyone does it the same way. It's always the woman has the files or the papers. She always runs into the man. The papers hit the floor, they bend down and then their eyes catch each other on the way up. It's done the same way every time. I've seen it done in books that way, too. What you want to do is you may need that meet queue moment. You may need that moment where the characters first fumble into each other. But that doesn't mean you have to do it the way that everyone has done it. You can find a creative way. Think, how can I make my characters meet without the carrying papers fall scene? How can I do something that's the same emotion, the same results, but comes at it in a fresh new light? And that, I think, is our challenge as writers is to be creative like that, to say, okay, I'm going to turn this cliche on its head and make it to where the reader doesn't even really realize that's what just happened, even though it did, or won't realize until after the passage that, oh, that's the meet queue, right?

[00:07:14].620] - Chris
If you're analyzing it, but you may not realize it right away.

[00:07:17].940] - Gena
Absolutely. And that's the thing. I think when you're talking about the just individual words or lines, that thing, that's the thing that you can come back to. That's the thing that when you are editing, maybe you write it that with the cliche the first time you go through it. But when you come back and this is fiction, non-fiction, this is article, blog, book, it doesn't matter. But you come back to it and you say, okay, that's a cliche. How can I say that in a new, original way. So that's going to happen at the editing phase.

[00:07:49].120] - Chris
Instead of once upon a time, you sit and look at it and go, How about a long time ago in a galaxy far away? And suddenly you're saying, that's the same thing, right? It's basically saying the same thing. But when George Lucas wrote that for Star Wars, it took on a whole new fresh feeling.

[00:08:04].960] - Gena
Yes, definitely. Now, when you're writing long form story, this is the thing that's going to happen more on the front end when you're really thinking it through and you're really planning and you're developing it.

[00:08:15].330] - Chris
I think so. I would like to get that scene created correctly in the plotting phase, but I'm a plotter, right? So I like to make sure that, okay, I'm going to plot that out, make sure I've got that meet queue happening in a way that isn't traditional. But that said, don't let that stop you from moving on. It's totally fine if you want to do the way it's always been done and then go back in the editing phase and say, okay, this scene needs to be a little fresher. Something more exciting needs to happen in here, and then you change it up and build it up. And sometimes then you can tie that in to a scene later in the book that will really become meaningful. And then the whole thing takes on a whole new life.

[00:08:55].270] - Gena
We should definitely do a podcast about tiebacks because we use them quite a bit it a bit. You can use them in fiction. You can use them in non-fiction. You can use them in an article. You can use them in a blog. It doesn't matter.

[00:09:06].980] - Chris
That's a teaser. We'll do that one for sure.

[00:09:08].420] - Gena
We'll do that one for sure. Tiebacks, weaving those things in. So, yeah, well look at that.

[00:09:13].720] - Chris
So cliches can be words, once at a time. Cliques can be scenes like the meet queue. Cliques can also be the entire structure of your story, which can be a little scary, honestly, to think that, okay, am I writing something that's already been done? And the truth is, almost everything has been done, but you can still write it in a fresh way. And so one of the things that we were talking about earlier was who uses formulas so well and has almost turned them into a cliché. That's Hallmark, right? They do that with Hallmark movies. They have got a formula they use and you expect certain things to happen in a Hallmark movie, but it works for them because that's their formula and that's Hallmark. But there are other competitors now who've come on this scene who like Amazon Prime or other services that decide, oh, we want to create something that's like a Hallmark movie. So they take a similar formula and they try to do the same thing. But because it's not under the hallmark brand, it doesn't come across as formulaic. It comes across as cliche. It's like they're copying Hallmark.

[00:10:24].210] - Chris
And so what they need to do is they need to say, how can we change the structure of this to give it a twist, give it something unique that's different that separates us from that industry standard.

[00:10:36].680] - Gena
They do. And they start bringing in different types of meet queues. If you want to have a fun exercise for yourself, go ahead and watch a Hallmark movie and then watch an Amazon movie and look for the differences, look for the ways that they've tried to freshen it up or ways they've tried to make it more their own.

[00:10:53].800] - Chris
Really encourage you with those, not only to watch them and watch them back to back, but sit down with a piece of paper and outline them as they happen. What happens in what order in this? And you'll see that there's a definite correlation between if you pick two romantic movies, there's going to be a definite correlation between those. If you pick two adventure movies that have happened over time, you're going to find correlations. But then you can also see where they vary and where they diverge from the norm. And that's where it just becomes fascinating. It's great.

[00:11:23].600] - Gena
So today we are talking about helping you identify and avoid cliches in your writing, whether that is in fiction or non-fiction, just in any form. Look for those things that have been done. Look for those things that have been overdone. Look for those things that are no longer fresh and come up with a more creative way of saying that or completing that.

[00:11:46].130] - Chris
Absolutely. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please rate, review, subscribe, and share with someone that you know. It really helps if you subscribe to it because then you won't miss the next one. When we talk about... What did we just say we were going to talk about?

[00:11:59].450] - Gena
We were going to talk about talk about... What are we going to talk about? The tiebacks. The tiebacks.

[00:12:02].960] - Chris
Talk about tiebacks. I need to write it down. We're going to do tiebacks in one of our upcoming episodes here. And if you don't want to miss that, and I strongly recommend you don't because it's such a powerful writing technique, subscribe. When you subscribe on your podcast app or on YouTube, you'll be sure you'll get notified when the next episode comes out and you won't miss a thing. So we thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. We love you guys. You're awesome. And remember, the what, Gena?

[00:12:28].960] - Gena
Together we have Writing Momentum.