To cliché or not to cliché? That is just a stupid question.

Cliché:

1. Overused expression: A phrase or word that has lost its original effectiveness or power from overuse.

2. Overused idea: An overused activity or notion.


Let me first say that anything that isn’t cliché today will be cliché tomorrow. Tomorrow’s cliché was today’s speech or actions. Today’s speech or action was yesterday’s primal grunts and hand signals…

We continue to evolve as a species and the biggest way to do that is by communication. Communication is simply a series of sounds, symbols, or sensations that spark a familiar form of reason or understanding in our brains ideally from overuse and repetition. So, in affect our very speech is cliché. Our lifestyle is cliché. What we eat is cliché. Our hobbies are cliché. Our clichés are clichés. Yes, I am attempting to create cliché as cliché.

It is best not to overuse anything because redundancy just becomes annoying much like the paragraph above. We cannot remove cliché from speech unless we remove speech from speech.I think that the cliché epidemic has caused too many people to become paranoid over the whole thing. That and the smarter some people get the dumber they behave.

What would happen if the writer was eventually weeded out of the writing and all stories were made to sound the same, like a cookie cutter voice? If that were ever to happen then the voice of a single writer would no longer exist and books would be produced like a factory: Stamped with a company name and not an author.

Writers would then all become employees under a company like a job and work 8-5. No royalties, no advances, but maybe a good dental plan. Consumers would no longer look for a favorite author they would just look for a favorite publishing company. The individual would now be obsolete and expendable. Older authors would probably be replaced by younger authors and quality replaced by quantity.

Eventually they would create an A.I. that could now replace the writers entirely and no one would notice because all writing would be the same anyway.

Some may welcome such a future but where would such an ideology bring us? Well, it would bring us wealthy publishing houses at the expense of poor writers. So, in this perspective, a little cliché or distinctive voice isn’t such a bad thing. A writer who uses repetition set apart from the format of other writers is using independent cliché to make his/her voice stand alone. Personally, I see nothing wrong with that. In that argument, however, if you are using cliché of other writers to stand out then you are stealing ideas to promote yourself and that is wrong. If you are using said clichés to honor a well known writer and it is done with that intent then it is acceptable.

So now we can agree that Clichés are not wrong if used correctly.

An example of a ludicrous cliché rule is, “You can’t use a mirror in a story to describe your character’s features.” What idiot created that rule? What else would you use a mirror for? I use a mirror everyday and I may not always love what I see but it is my features that I look at and not the wall behind me.

A gray area cliché is, “His nerves were tight like steel.” Good for Robert E. Howard but now considered cliché to us.

An appropriate cliché, “If it aint broke don’t fix it.”

And now for a prime example of cliché, “I saw that coming a mile away.” (Let me guess, you saw that cliché a mile away?)

Sometimes an apple really is just an apple. So, let’s not get carried away before we all get replaced by machines.

…Or perhaps we already are.