Cliché
A cliché is an expression, scene or premise used so often it has lost freshness; in genre fiction it is not something to avoid but material to know and twist.
Also written as: cliche
Meaning
A cliché is something repeated so often it has lost its newness. It exists at the sentence level ("my heart felt like it would burst"), the scene level (a breakup in the rain, a face reflected in a window) and the premise level (amnesia, secretly the heir to a conglomerate). A trope is a genre's promised ingredient (regression, contract marriage); a cliché is that ingredient repeated with no variation. The same regression is a trope when given a new cause and consequence, and a cliché when rewritten exactly as seen before.
Why it matters
Genre readers recognize clichés, and recognition breaks immersion. When "I saw this scene in the last book I read" appears in the comments, that episode has failed to earn its price. But avoiding clichés wholesale is its own trap. They were repeated because they worked, and genre readers arrive expecting that satisfaction. The answer is know and twist: at the moment the reader predicts the next line, step half a pace off the prediction. Give the first half of the cliché intact and change the outcome, let a character notice the cliché, or invent a new reason for it. AI drafts are collections of clichés, so when writing with AI half of revision is clearing them out.
Example
Cliché: She stumbled and he caught her. Their eyes met. Time seemed to stop.
Twist: She stumbled and he caught her. She pulled away instantly. "Heel's broken. Good thing they're company shoes, not mine." He looked down at his hands. The speed of her pulling away bothered him. It was the speed of someone who hates being held.
The first half (stumble, catch) is the cliché unchanged. Her reaction leaves the prediction, and the reaction becomes new information (hates being held, a hook into her past).
Common mistakes
- Not knowing the clichés. Without a list of your genre's clichés you can neither avoid nor twist them. Read the first episode of ten hits in your genre.
- Avoiding so hard you leave the genre. Remove the ball from a rofan and rofan readers leave. Deliver the cliché's satisfaction and change only its form.
- Leaving sentence clichés in. "Beyond words", "breathtaking": delete mechanically in revision.