Busted! Mark L. Danielewski Caught Building on Cliché

This post originally ran on September 3, 2010. If we run it again, will it become cliché?

Stop in the name of love.

You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait.

Whenever you’re near I hear a symphony.

If the Supremes sang it in the sixties, chances are it’s a cliché today. And what are we writers told? Don’t use clichés. This makes sense from a business perspective. Why should a publisher pay a wordsmith to regurgitate combinations so recognizable that readers are numb to them? We need to do the work of writers and come up with new word combinations that will snag the reader’s interest and inspire new thought.

But don't throw the love child out with the bath water just yet. A known cliché could lay the groundwork upon which you could create a meaningful—even a Supreme—twist.

In House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski did just that in the following exchange between the narrator and a woman he just met. Even out of context it is easy to see how he uses a lyric from the sixties to evoke character and voice.

“Thank you,” I said, thinking I should kneel.
“Thank you,” she insisted.
Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don’t know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-f***ing-sweet symphony. I don’t know what I’m saying. I know absolutely sh*t about symphonies.

Those of you wanting to fuel your inner flame may want to check out the images and techniques Danielewski offers up in his creatively dense experimental fiction. He continues this passage by elaborating on another cliché—about how this woman has left him "reeling."

And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified.

In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, "Who's this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?" which it turns out I didn't think at all but accidentally said out loud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.

Don’t berate yourself if your first draft lacks sparkle due to an overuse of clichés. This simply proves their ubiquity: finding clichés conveniently lined up at the front of the shelf marked IMAGERY, your mind used them as shorthand for laying down your story.

Sensitize yourself to look for worn out phrases in subsequent drafts. Replace most of them with more evocative language. If you identify a cliché that works well for you, try refreshing it with a twist. Like any edited prose you will want your twisted cliché to create voice, deepen characterization, and further plot.

Here are a few examples where I turned first draft shorthand into second draft imagery.

They got along like cat and mouse:
The roles they slipped into were threadbare costumes: she the cat, bored and de-clawed; he a near-dead mouse.

He stuck his foot in his mouth:
He sat there with a size 12 Chuck Taylor hanging from his lips, the rubber sour against his tongue.

Anyone want to join in the fun? Twist one of these or sub in one of your own.

Between you and me and the bedpost
Been there, done that
From head to toe
Bring home the bacon

I know you'll come up with something admirable. After all, what is a river deep, or even a mountain high, between a writer and a word challenge?

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Kathryn Craft specializes in developmental editing at Writing-Partner.com, an independent manuscript evaluation and editing service. What she believes: 1. Editing forever changed the way she reads. 2. Well-crafted moments of brilliance help her forgive many other problems in a manuscript. 3. All writers have strengths and weaknesses—but why settle for weaknesses? 4. We can learn as much from what other authors do right as we can from what we do wrong. This is her series, "Busted!—An author caught doing something right."