As I work with writers in my coaching and editing practice, I notice that many do not seem aware to avoid clichés lurking everywhere in their pages. They just don’t seem to be on the alert.
“Avoid clichés. Don’t let a cliché get you down in the dumps,” I tell them. “Better late than never to learn!”
Oops, I’m doing clichés again! I’ll be a good boy and not do them anymore.
I give my writers a shorthand: if it sounds like you’ve heard it before it is probably a cliché.
By the way, if you want to brush up on your cliches, go on the internet and ask for a list of clichés. Yes, I’m sending you to study lists of hundreds and hundreds of phrases to avoid.
Why am I writing this?
If you do not avoid clichés (and their close problem: stereotypes), you will undermine the unique and personal feel of your memoir. Clichés and stereotypes especially in memoir characterization place people in often erroneous and certainly indefensible categories. As shorthand ways of writing and speaking, they reflect ready-made thoughts and adversely affect the ways we relate to our families and friends as unique individuals and how we write about them.
“She was a mother hen—you know how mothers are!”
“My father had a heart of gold.”
“Those were glory days. We were as happy as ducks in water.”
These examples of of clichés and stereotypes reflect ways of thinking that get in the way of seeing people as individuals and events as unique. Strive for precise words. (Check here and here.) If you think of your mother in generic terms as “a mother,” you will be weighed down with all the sentimental good and bad that second-rate movies, mass-market novels and sentimental songs sell us. Instead, strive to see her as a unique person, a woman who met the challenges of mothering as successfully as she did or could. Do the same with your father—and everyone.
And that goes for “youth” and “love” and “family” and everything else that can get sentimental really fast.
I highlighted in red all the clichés—or suspected clichés—in my chapter and then I created alternate ways of saying what I had hoped to say. The results were so much more forceful. — an editing client
Two suggestions to avoid cliches and stereotypes
- Beware of words and phrases that have the ring of having been heard elsewhere. If you sense that a phrase you use is not your own original pairing of two or more words and that you may have “borrowed” it, chances are you have a cliché or a stereotype dripping off the end of your pen or popping up on the computer screen—to embarrass you later!
- Create a language that is as fresh as you are. The challenge of writing is to have your words reflect you and your story, not someone else’s version of you and your story. If you do not avoid cliches and stereotypes, you slip into someone else’s version and away from your truth.
I guess I’ll have to stop writing “deathless prose” if I want to avoid clichés.
In conclusion
Learn to do away with cliches and stereotypes by using the two suggestions above.
Remember: whatever you do today, write a bit on your memoir and “put your nose to the grindstone.” (Oops, and I had promised to go there again!”)
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If you would like to have help to discern and then avoid cliches and stereotypes in your texts, work with a Memoir Network editor.
For your own copy of an interesting and meaningful memoir, click here.
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