Cliché: A COMMON CRIMINAL
Your ability to spot a cliché will depend, to a large extent, on the breadth and depth of your reading. ‘Greedy as a pig’ would be an original comparison to an infant encountering his or her first picture book, whereas most literate adults would consider this rather tired. It is an obvious example though. In writing fiction a word or literary device may well seem perfect for whatever you want to convey. Only when editing the piece will you begin to have doubts.
Familiarity with all literature ever would be impossible for even the most compulsive reader. Anyway, it isn’t a matter of checking your word choice against an unchanging glossary of clichés. Some phrases go out of fashion while others are on the rise. What is overused today may seem fresh and lively in a hundred years.
Clichés cut in
But why should you avoid these nasty little creatures? Putting it simply, they risk taking your reader away from the story. They are the microphone hovering into view during a favourite soap opera, ruining the suspension of disbelief. Imagine reading a wonderfully vivid passage only for it to end with ‘and it was all a dream’, or to be told that the protagonist looked in the mirror and saw she was ‘as white as a sheet’.
