Cliché: A Time and a Place?

Fig. 1. Atkinson, P. (1884). Our Three-Volume Novel at a Glance. 

We’ve all sat through an English class where a teacher warns us against using clichés. Sure, a few clichés in a piece of fiction can make the whole text feel unoriginal, but there are much more complex reasons why cliché impacts a story so much when overused or not utilised properly. Cliché does present a genuine problem with originality and meaning-making at a cognitive level. However, in my opinion as a BA Creative Writing grad, there are some instances where, when used appropriately and in the right context, cliché can be used to benefit rather than detract from creative writing. 

Merriam-Webster dictionary starts its entry for the term cliché with one of the most common definitions, that a cliché is “a trite phrase or expression.” This is familiar, but doesn’t encompass other elements that many people would associate with the term ‘cliché’, like overdone plot points or characters and so on. The remaining Merriam-Webster entries show the wider scope of what cliché has come to mean, including “a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation” and “something… that has become overly familiar or commonplace.” For this article, I’m going to define cliché as a phrase, wording, idea, or image that has been repeated to the point where it feels predictable or overdone. That includes tropes, idioms, character archetypes, metaphors and phrases that could be considered ‘overused’.  

Cliché is not a simple problem with an easy solution, as it can present deep, cognitive level issues. In “On Cliché: Expression, Cognition and Understanding”, Craig Jordan-Baker argues that the problematic elements of cliché in creative writing go beyond unoriginality or aesthetic reasons, and genuinely inhibit the cognitive processes of thinking about and making meaning of writing. He draws on research that shows clichés are stored as ‘whole units’ in the brain, rather than as individual components that need to be picked apart and made sense of by the reader. Cliché, he argues, inhibits any complex thinking because “where we can anticipate, we need not listen” (p.11). While cliché does present problems for a story, the numerous think pieces about avoiding cliché do not leave room for when cliché may be appropriate or even useful.  

Using a cliché in a character or in dialogue can be useful for showing character elements like personality, age, and ethnicity. Clichés are part of our everyday speech, whether English teachers like it or not, including some that do not register as being clichés at all. Nigel Fountain’s “Clichés: Avoid Them Like The Plague” covers many of these- phrases like ‘whatever’, ‘work-life balance’, or to take an idea and ‘run with it’ (2012). Take the example above, a comic from Punch Almanac for 1885, which is a humorous take on the clichéd metaphors that were popular in the literature of the time. In this example, the action that this phrase implies is so ingrained that subverting it by taking it literally is a source of surprise and humour. This demonstrates how ‘hidden’ some clichés are, and how difficult they can be to avoid. So, including cliché can make for authentic dialogue, it makes it sound like an actual person is talking. Using carefully chosen, specific clichés in dialogue and description can also demonstrate character. Speculative fiction author Jo Eberhardt writes a passage of dialogue to show this, asking us to consider the character who says this: “The old digger may have a few ‘roos loose in the top paddock, but you stop stirring the pot and she’ll be right.” (writerunboxed.com, 2016). From this, we can quickly gather that this character is probably a gruff older bloke from rural Australia, just by the use of location and time specific clichés. If he was also described as wearing a black singlet, rugby shorts, and gumboots (an example of a visual cliché), this would characterize him further. Cliché can be effectively utilised as a kind of ‘shorthand’ (Eberhardt, 2016) to show character.  

Cliché can also be used to effect within a story by building an expectation and subverting it, or ‘anti-cliché’. This surprise is the basis of humour and shock. Terry Pratchett often uses these to effect within his Discworld series, with phrases like “and that which does kill us makes us dead” (Carpe Jugulum), “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” (Equal Rites), and most famously “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life” (Jingo). These humorous malapropisms can also be useful for showing a story’s or a character’s sensibilities, background, and intellect or lack of. Another example is Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. The protagonist in this story holds a clichéd idea of war, one of honour and glory. During the novel, he learns the horrors of warfare including being treated as expendable by superior officers and facing the grim terror of combat. He sees his own previously held ideals were clichéd, unexamined, and uninformed. The clichés here show a certain bravado and naivety of character and become the basis for the true shock of the story.  

Occasionally, cliché goes beyond being useful to being necessary. Conventions and tropes, the defining building blocks of genre, can often be considered clichés due to the repetitive nature of them. Sometimes, these are necessary for the functioning of a story entirely. New York Times bestselling fantasy and sci-fi writer Susan Dennard concludes that genre fiction entirely relies on these tropes, saying “I wouldn’t pick up a mystery if I thought the killer wasn’t going to be revealed at some point. I wouldn’t pick up that romance if there wasn’t a happily-ever-after ending.” They can be important story driving aspects, like the ‘ticking clock’ in a thriller, or used to signal ideas quickly, like a cape on a superhero. Most importantly, certain conventions create catharsis, as our history of stories teaches us to expect certain results and feel satisfaction when they are fulfilled. According to Adolphe Haberer’s ‘A Defense of the Cliché’ from the Journal of English Studies, clichés can articulate symbolism and find their own merit through commonality. “What it has lost in the way of novelty and piquancy,” he says, “is made up for by its familiar smoothness.”(p. 150). Tropes can also be exaggerated for comedic and character purposes, like Austin Powers playing with spy genre tropes, or Scary Movie playing with horror conventions.  

Cliché definitely presents an issue with authentic cognitive understanding in a text and can quickly alienate a reader or obfuscate meaning. However, this does not mean that clichés are always negative: not only are they occasionally unavoidable, but there are also many instances when they can be used to the author’s advantage within a story. Some clichés are unavoidable, and others still have a timeless truthfulness or universality that makes them socially valuable. Clichés do come from generations of human experience and storytelling and are a touchstone for many people in day-to-day life. At the end of the day, there is a time and a place for cliché.