Babel Clash

People don’t like cliches.

People LOVE cliches.

And there’s really no reason they shouldn’t.  Cliches are everywhere, all the time, in every story.  Even the most popular story is built upon a house of cliches.  Let’s take a look, shall we?

Harry Potter is a reluctant everyman chosen by destiny to defeat an evil tyrant.  Hermoine Granger is an overeager, booksmart student who is never quite as smart as she thinks she is.  Ron Weasley is a well-intentioned, clumsy underachiever.  Dumbledore is a wise mentor.  Snape is a red herring.  And Voldemort is an evil madman who wants to rule the world.

There is nothing original about any of those characterizations.  Nothing to make them jump off the shelf at the reader.  Yet Harry Potter is outrageously popular (just in case you didn’t know this already).  I’m not attacking the books.  I’m merely pointing out the obvious.  For all it’s praise, Harry Potter is not original.  This is hardly surprising.  Originality is an overrated virtue.  The audience doesn’t care if your characters are original.  They just want characters they can care about.

While it might be heresy to some, let’s compare another phenomenally YA series:  Twilight.  Bela is the typical unnoticed (yet somehow beautiful) and unpopular outsider.  Edward is the eternal youth who discovers dangerous passion via th discovery of his “true love”.  And Jacob…well…Native American werewolves really are a dime-a-dozen at this point.

I’ll leave history to determine which series is the better, but both are riddled with cliches.  Neither suffers for them.  Cliches are nebulous things.  They’re almost impossible to pin down and even harder to avoid.  For example:  Johnny is an outsider, a rebel, who discovers, through the attention of a dedicated teacher (yet another cliche), that he has a future.  OR Johnny is an outsider, a rebel, who is swallowed up by the hopeless indifference of the streets, turning to a life of crime.  Johnny #1 goes to college, uses his education to rise from his circumstances, and becomes a useful member of society.  Johnny #2 joins a gang where he applies his utter ruthlessness to become kingpin of the neighborhood.  Either way you slice it, Johnny is a cliche.

You can even cut it thinner.  Johnny #2A becomes an untouchable crimelord.  Johnny #2B is betrayed by his own cutthroat henchmen, learning too late that crime is a harsh mistress.

But wait, let’s go for one more while we’re at it.  Johnny #2B1 is brutally murdered, his life and death amounting to nothing but a harsh morality play on the dangers of a violent world.  Johnny #2B2 barely survives his betrayal.  He recovers from his injuries with the help of a hooker with a heart of gold (why the heck not?) and enacts his own bloody revenge on those who betrayed him.

And so it goes.  Every path, every turn, is just another story that’s been told before being played out by characters that have existed, in some permutation or another, since the dawn of storytelling.  (For the record, I love the word permutation and will use it every chance I get.)  So let’s just admit this.  Cliches are everywhere, and the only way to avoid them is to write something bizarre that, even if it does make sense, is probably not very satisfying.

And really, let’s get down to it.  People like cliches.  They just don’t like all of them.  The problem is that nobody quite agrees on which cliches are good and which are bad.

I’m a fantasy guy.  Not just fantasy, but crazy, outrageous fantasy.  I like giant robots, evil geniuses, raging werewolves, and mole people.  Oh, how I love mole people and giant robots.  Some consider these things silly.  For the record, they are wrong, but the object of this article is not to correct these fallacies.

I’m not a big fan of low fantasy.  Or English period costume dramas.  Or any movie where someone dies tragically so that a writer can impress us with how deep he / she is.  Yet there is nothing intrinsically wrong with these types of stories.  They just aren’t my cup of tea.

People use the term cliched when they don’t like something, and they overlook cliches when they do.  That’s just the way it works.  The term cliched itself has never meant much to me.  It’s a convenient catch-all, and while it rarely means what people think it means, it always reflects a story falling short for someone.  So let’s give cliches a break.  They’re out there, everyday, working hard, building our favorite stories.

Good night, little cliches.  And good luck.

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