Cliches of YOUR writing?

I seem to have a lot of dead people in my stories. I'm finding my stories usually end up a little on the sad side. Even my attempts at romantic or funny stories are all a little sad. Someone told me they were all whimsical and sad. Maybe I'm morbid .

I have a lot of people struggling to become more self-reliant, a lot of secretive but sympathetic authority figures, a lot of splashy action scenes.

Catgirls keep creeping in, somehow. Or at least girls with tails. I got a thing for tails and catgirls. And wings, wings too, those are neat.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I am a deeply strange and bizzare person.

Oh and another thing that keeps popping up in my stories are guns, fast dilouge and nazis or one form or another.

The dead are always in there somewhere. The protaganist doesn't get what they want. Ever. Or if they do, it's at such a great cost that they probably wish the hadn't wanted it in the first place.

Reluctant goddesses, a certain greyness to the morality on both sides, love always fails, even when it wins.

Oh lordy I'm depressing myself now. Despite these negative themes they're not *that* depressing, i assure you. There's always some kind of tendril of hope somewhere in them.

I was worried till I read the tendril of hope bit.

I forgot to mention that my stories are mostly chipper and end happily. They have nasty bits in the middle thought. But the people responsible for the nasty bits always get they're comeuppance. Introduce rapist at the begging, gouge out rapist's eye in the middle, slam rapist into the ceiling at 20 G's by the end.

Hehehe...that was satisfying. That's another thing that keeps popping up! Killing off the bad guy in a really satisfying way. I think my favored attempt was when the girl character was being kept captive by this sicko army officer from the other side, and he's asking her if he'd look better in gold or blue today.

"I think," The girl character says before stabbing him in the throat with a shard of broken mirror. "You'd look better in red"

That was savagely fun to write.

I'll leave now.

There are Gods in 4 of 7 stories I currently have in various stages of development (most of these are having their worlds built, getting the plot organised, etc; I'm not writing them all at once). Then there are non-but-apparent-gods in 2.

There is magic in...all of them.

Continuation of life after death (reincarnation, the next world, ghosts, etc) is relevant to 4.

The nature of consciousness features in 5.

Moral ambiguity in 5.

Don't know if these are my cliches, or my themes, or both.

This might be kind of odd, but I find a lot of fat characters, and with them, a lot of fat jokes. I don't really know what's going on with that, but I'm working on fixing it...

Swords. Cold steel. Mayhem.

*sniff* Every word I type is stunningly original.

...I wish.
1) The wise and charmigly cantankerous old teacher who patiently shepherds his/her student through a difficult stage of life.
2) The turning-point-under-fire where the MC discovers something critical about their personality and comes to a decision about where to go from there.
3) Highly emotional confrontations between multiple MCs and/or supporting roles just after said turning-point.

Ick. Yeck. I think I'm going to lock myself in my room and re-write about 10 chapters now. Goodbye, cruel world.

LOL! Whenever I write at night, my characters always end up falling asleep at the end of each chapter. Then I have to go back and edit lest they all be diagnosed with narcolepsy.

i have no compunction with killing off my MC by the end.

i tend to take things to the plausible extreme, stopping short of wanting the reader ask what more stupid crap can happen?

i re-use characters and names often.

i got in the habit of ending almost every section with a cliffhangar. not a theme, but a method.

i rarely, if ever, start off with a theme in mind, but as i write they seem to make themselves apparent and i'll run with that, and it usually alters the story in some way. i also don't do what you'd call an outline, so i'm free to do pretty much as i please.

i rarely go into strategic details of a battle. i'll more often than not just skip the battle and go right to the aftermath, which has always intrigued me more than the fight itself.

all my MCs are anti-heroes (with just a few exceptions).

ghosts. pirates. what else do you need?

i almost never feel the need to describe to the reader how a magick system works in any appreciative detail. it works because some god says so.

cemetaries and digging up the dead is something i think i've had in just about every extended fantasy story i've ever done. if it's been in 'the raven' with vincent price, i've ripped it off.

but, this thread is about what cliches do we use....

i'm very conscious of cliches. as a result, i try to avoid them whenever i can. while i do tend to follow a loose rendition of the hero's journey just because i *am* a hack, you won't see any farmboys mentored by a wizard, no world domination by evil for the sake of world domination (there *has* to be a reason), no healing potion that cures mortal wounds in a day or so. i really do mean to write adult escapism, things not really meant for virgin eyes. my whores are whores, sometimes justified, sometimes just ignorant scum passing along disease; my soldiers are afraid of dying; my women can be crazy, irrational bitches; my men can be brutish dullards with a might makes right mentality... and those are the good guys. for me, it's all about the emotions you attach to your characters.

there aren't any camelots in my stories, per se. splendid palaces are naught but veneers. my cliches therein resides in unsane kings, which i've a penchant for.

i used to have heroes who could take immeasurable amounts of damage. i'm older now and know better. my heroes wake up with arthritis, fingers unable to stretch out as a result of years of holding a sword, lower back problems from extended horse riding, that kind of thing. it's those kind of details i look for and rarely find. even putting those on top of a cliche character helps make them seem less cliche. their swords are also bent and chipped sometimes, a little rust starting to show, and the leather wrapping on the handles are coming loose if they've not the time to care for them. i find that detail more interesting than how magick works. too, i don't believe you just get stabbed or shot with an arrow and die instantly. maybe people do, i just don't see how, though. okay, you shoot someone in the heart and death is imminent ~ there are at least fleeting seconds of life left, minutes maybe before they bleed out and their brains die. a stab to the liver will kill them... in fifteen minutes. how is it you slit a man's throat and he crumples dead less than two seconds afterwards? you can guillotine a person and their head lives for a few moments, but somehow a bullet wound to the lung and you're a goner before your nazi ass hits the dirt. i don't get it, and as a result even my fodder doesn't just die instantly as a rule unless incredibly serious damage is inflicted.

you're not likely to find an abundance of detail cliches in my stuff, or even obvious character archetypes. you're more likely to find plot cliches, and even those i weigh their value out. i'm kind of more about drama than action, slices of life than the big picture, realism than idealizing. then again, i might be in the mood for pure fun in which case cliches feel more appropriate to embrace than discount out of hand. still, even i, mr. anti-cliche, will find them in my stuff every now and then. being a hack, meaning that my junk is very much a reflection of other people's junk, i might go just a bit further than some folk in making things as cliche-free as i reasonably can. note that doing just the exact opposite of what the cliche is isn't being particularly creative, either, and overdone can be just as bad as had you riddled the thing with them. i think writing, like most other things, takes a delicate balance. throwing out words and ideas with all the precision of a sawed off shotgun doesn't produce greatness, balance and insight are better, imo.

C.bronco said:

LOL! Whenever I write at night, my characters always end up falling asleep at the end of each chapter. Then I have to go back and edit lest they all be diagnosed with narcolepsy.

Click to expand...

Mine do the same thing. I know it's time to turn off the computer when one of my characters yawns or says "I'm so tired."

Characters masterign stregnth slowly, and becoming powerful towards the end. Another thing which crops up is weak starter heroes. My first is a farmer, my second is a loser and my third is a boy my age.

They all grow in their own talents. The first and second grow in stregnth, and the third in learning, knowledge and ability.

'The turning-point-under-fire where the MC discovers something critical about their personality and comes to a decision about where to go from there.' ~ what's wrong with that? some would argue this is an intregral part of character growth, that being an intregral part of effective storytelling. maybe not always exactly as you expressed it, but it's important that the character grow by the end of the book. it may not always have to be an epiphany like you said, but the character has to change.

imo, that's why a lot of young fantasy writers write stories that by the end aren't terribly satisfying to any but their peers. sorry, kids, but experience and emotional depth goes a long way even in fantasy. so few young writers have that, and those that do sometimes have trouble expressing it, so when it happens it's a great thing. i hate to put it so bluntly, but imo fantasy appeals to young writers not only because it's a 'phase' of development (which us older people seem to be stuck in for some reason, we just call it 'escapism' to make it seem more adult, then we'll use a lot of bullshit history about fantasy to justify it with phrases like 'fantasy contains archetypes that are at the core of our very beings blah blah blah,' instead of admitting we may have still a lot of child and/or dork in us which is more likely the case... yeah, that's why our cubicles are lined with action figures, because they're 'archetypes,' huh? lol), but also young writers might feel they can get away with their lack of depth and experience by putting their story in a world where you can hide things with magick and fantasic creatures and adventure.

that's not saying this is bad or anything, just that you can usually tell when the writer is young, and usually even if the writer is male or female. (in my experience, young writers what have decent depth of emotions are invariably female (please, no more girls staring out the window watching rain or snow falling). males tend to meander from gore fest to slaughterhouse to killing field with little insight along the way, feelings and emotions aren't exactly top priority stuff at this point. this is why a lot of young men hate dramas, i think, because they're not mature, for lack of a better word, to appreciate the, ah, important stuff, again for lack of a better phrase. being writers and probably naturally observant, though, and male writers i think have a good chance of maturing faster than regular dumbass kids walking around with their pantswaist somewhere near their knees (if you want to see something funny, watch these guys who have to suddenly do something other than walk ~ it's like a live version of the keystone cops).

adventure is cool, too, though. perspective comes in time, insight with experience. until then we can use craft to pull it through and some creativity to avoid excessive cliches.

preyer said:

imo fantasy appeals to young writers not only because it's a 'phase' of development (which us older people seem to be stuck in for some reason, we just call it 'escapism' to make it seem more adult, then we'll use a lot of bullshit history about fantasy to justify it with phrases like 'fantasy contains archetypes that are at the core of our very beings blah blah blah,'

Click to expand...

Ha! - that's pretty much dead-on. I learned to be ashamed of writing and enjoying genre fiction in college, and definitely threw plenty of that around to justify myself to my profs (none of it worked, of course). Been unlearning it ever since.
Why is that, BTW? It seems like a perfectly valid mode; and plenty of authors manage some great social commentary through it.
And you've just alerted me to another dreaded cliche...I'm going to go look at those ubiquitous staring-at-the-snow scenes now. The horror; the horror.

Uh-oh, I have a playing in the snow scene... is that cliche? I mean she had to look at the window first to see that it was snowing before going outside... I'm justifying myself again... *sigh*

My villains all have smooth british accents.

My villains sometimes get away without repercussions.

I write a lot about temptation and redemption, and struggles with one's basic nature.

My heroes are all handsome and cool (hey, I write romance so it's expected).

My characters rarely, if ever, have children. If they do, the children are usually grown or not in the picture. So far I've had exactly one MC who had a baby, but she had nothing to do with it.

Imperial Restorations. I've had attempts to usurp empires in both SF and Fantasy. Also the power of belief has been a recurring theme in my writing.

Same here

C.bronco said:

LOL! Whenever I write at night, my characters always end up falling asleep at the end of each chapter. Then I have to go back and edit lest they all be diagnosed with narcolepsy.

Click to expand...

Yeap......happens to me too.

Mine tend to involve juxtaposition of unlike elements. I can think of at least five (current WIP + ideas waiting their turn) that have one culture discovering or conquering or rediscovering another, with the events triggered by that interaction.

Then there's one particular character who's shown up in two different stories now -- different name, different profession, entirely different world, but it's the same guy. I think I'm going to have to watch for him trying to hijack additional stories!

People in my novels don't walk anywhere. They head for places or cross to places, but they never simply walk anywhere.

I'm honestly working on a story with a farm boy as the protagonist. And he does find a magic widget, but it's going to be funny (I hope).