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There’s been a wonderful response to our Worst Cliché poll — over 200 votes so far. And the results are very interesting.
What’s the worst cliché in fiction?
Total Voters: 215
I’m amazed that the voting was spread so evenly — every option received at least 7 votes. These clichés really are hated. And yet writers keep dragging the corpses of these old ideas into the limelight, mercilessly flogging them until every bystander is spattered with rotten, purulent droplets of fetid clichéflesh.
Of course, this wasn’t an exhaustive list of every living cliché. I left out many genre-specific examples — like the detective who is “haunted by demons from his past”1, which is such a mainstay of crime fiction that it’s almost a defining characteristic of the genre. I also left out the deus ex machina and the “I woke up and it was all a dream”, critical storytelling flaws that only seem like clichés because writers fall back on them so often.
From the results we can see that the most hated storytelling clichés are the Designated Hottie (at best, sexist, and at worst, sexist pornofantasy), the Mary Sue (just write your fsckin’ autobiography — then burn it), and the Prophecy (thanks for telling me the ending on page 12).
But, in a result that surprised me, the overall winner was the clichéd phrases — “Little did he know”, “would change his life forever” or “he loved her. He really loved her.” I assume that most voters (correctly) interpreted this choice as representative of cliché phrases in general, not just these three.
Clearly, readers are prepared to put up with clichéd plots and repetitive story elements — in many cases, it’s the clichés that define the genre, and give readers the confidence to purchase a book by an unfamiliar author. But clichéd language, no matter the genre, is always a distraction, a jolt out of the fictional world, back to the painful reality that the writer just didn’t care enough to think of something interesting to say.
For the intrepid software developer, this is a market niche — the challenge of automatically detecting story clichés is beyond the capacity of computers, but the detection of repetitive phrases is trivial. Vast databases of clichéd phrases are already in existence. Perhaps as a standalone tool, or in the next version of MS Word, we will see this message:
Warning: Clichéd phrase. Consider revising, with something original.
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Complaining about cliches is SOOO cliche.
Cliche’s like ‘little did he know’ and ‘it would change his life forever’ can be particularly bad when the story is told from the sole POV of the ‘he’ the cliche’s are referring to. If he didn’t know how can he be telling us?!
[...] Worst Cliche Poll… Jump to Comments I mentioned Sean Lindsay’s poll about the Worst Cliches over on 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. Well, the results are in. Conveniently, as it happens, because I’m still unpacking. You can check out the results here. [...]
sad to say, i wasnt able to participate with the poll. would have voted for “He ran a hand through his hair, so that the author could pad out the chapter with description.” haha!