AVOID This Writing TRAP Like the Plague

Gena: 00:00:07

Hi, and welcome to the Writing Momentum Podcast.

Gena: 00:00:10

I'm Gena Maselli, and this is my husband, Christopher Maselli.

Christopher: 00:00:13

Hey.

Gena: 00:00:13

And we are here to talk about avoid this writing trap like the plague.

Gena: 00:00:19

And we are talking today, Chris, about this writing trap that sneaks in,

Gena: 00:00:24

in just about any kind of writing.

Christopher: 00:00:26

Yeah.

Christopher: 00:00:26

This is a writing trap that you will see often, so often that you

Christopher: 00:00:29

might say, wow, that seems like a cliche, and that's because it is.

Christopher: 00:00:34

That's exactly what we're gonna talk about here.

Christopher: 00:00:36

This writing trap is cliches, but cliches maybe aren't

Christopher: 00:00:40

entirely what you think they are.

Christopher: 00:00:42

How would you define a cliche Gena?

Gena: 00:00:44

I would define a cliche as anything that is written.

Gena: 00:00:48

That and we're talking about writing here, so that's, I'm gonna limit it to that.

Gena: 00:00:52

But anything that is lit written that has been used so much.

Gena: 00:00:57

That it has lost its punch and have even caused people to roll their eyes.

Christopher: 00:01:02

That's a good way to look at it.

Christopher: 00:01:03

Something that makes you roll your eyes, cuz you've seen it so many times.

Christopher: 00:01:07

So for instance, this makes me think of when I was a judge with Writer's

Christopher: 00:01:11

Digest for a while, and one of the things I was a judge for children's

Christopher: 00:01:16

picture books and I received literally hundreds of children's picture books

Christopher: 00:01:21

that people had sent in for the contest.

Christopher: 00:01:23

And then I had to judge them, right, and then say, here's the ones who win.

Christopher: 00:01:27

Here's the ones who don't.

Christopher: 00:01:29

And what I was surprised with was how many common things that

Christopher: 00:01:33

I saw among those manuscripts.

Christopher: 00:01:35

And one of the biggest ones was the cliche.

Christopher: 00:01:39

The cliche of Once Upon A Time.

Christopher: 00:01:42

We grew up, many of us with books that started with the words Once Upon a Time.

Christopher: 00:01:47

And so when we write our children's material, we want to start like that,

Christopher: 00:01:51

but those words have become a cliche.

Christopher: 00:01:55

And by starting your book with Once Upon a Time, unless it's

Christopher: 00:01:58

like a fractured fairytale, right?

Christopher: 00:02:01

That's trying to make fun of that genre, it doesn't really work anymore

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because it's been done so much.

Christopher: 00:02:08

So if you're writing a children's book, you don't want to start with words like

Christopher: 00:02:11

that because they've become a cliche.

Christopher: 00:02:14

And that could be said for, I think for a lot of words that you put

Christopher: 00:02:17

individually in a book, if you're having characters talk, and in their

Christopher: 00:02:21

dialogue they're saying things that are cliches, it's okay once in a while,

Christopher: 00:02:27

but if you do it too often, it becomes.

Christopher: 00:02:31

Cliche.

Gena: 00:02:31

It becomes cliche and it loses its punch.

Gena: 00:02:34

Chris is talking about children's books, but this is in all writing.

Gena: 00:02:37

This can be in non-fiction as well.

Gena: 00:02:40

One of the ones that has become very popular right now that every time I

Gena: 00:02:44

hear it, I just cringe on the inside, is when a speaker or a writer tells

Gena: 00:02:50

me they're going to unpack something.

Gena: 00:02:52

I've gotten to the place where I'm like, I loved that when it first came out, but

Gena: 00:02:56

that's about 10 years ago and we need to come up with a new way of saying it.

Gena: 00:03:01

Another one would be for the non-fiction writer, the advice that

Gena: 00:03:05

we've been given, pull yourself up with, from your bootstraps.

Gena: 00:03:08

Or you've gotten out on the wrong side of the bed in the morning.

Gena: 00:03:12

This is our job as writers, to come up with a new way of saying

Gena: 00:03:20

what maybe has become a cliche.

Christopher: 00:03:23

Yeah, to be more creative.

Christopher: 00:03:24

Say it's been said like this a hundred times before, how can I say, the same

Christopher: 00:03:30

thing, but in a new and fresh way.

Christopher: 00:03:32

And sometimes you'll see, the books that strike you most, the lines that

Christopher: 00:03:37

strike you most aren't the ones that are necessarily completely original,

Christopher: 00:03:43

but the ones who say something that you know and agree with deep down inside,

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but they say it in a way that you never quite thought of it that way before.

Christopher: 00:03:54

You've never heard a phrase that way before and it sticks with you.

Gena: 00:03:57

That's the thing that really grabs you.

Gena: 00:03:59

And I think it's that unexpected, because sometimes if you're talking

Gena: 00:04:03

about something or you're writing a scene, or you're writing a chapter, or

Gena: 00:04:07

you're writing an article or a blog post.

Gena: 00:04:10

The thing that will really resonate with people is the unexpected.

Gena: 00:04:14

It's that it's taking something where they think they know where you're going,

Gena: 00:04:18

and then you flip it on its head, or you twist it in such a way, in some

Gena: 00:04:22

fresh way that makes people go, oh, I never thought of it like that before.

Christopher: 00:04:27

And so this happens a lot with individual words, but

Christopher: 00:04:30

it can also happen in scenes.

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There are scenes that we put in our books that are cliche, and

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these also show up in movies.

Christopher: 00:04:39

In movie scenes.

Christopher: 00:04:40

So what's an example of a scene that you would say, man, that is totally a cliche.

Gena: 00:04:46

And I will put a little bit of a disclaimer on this to say that some of

Gena: 00:04:51

the most popular movies or companies that produce movies live on cliches,

Gena: 00:04:59

and they have made a whole kind of genre on cliches, and that is okay.

Gena: 00:05:05

That is, that's their model, that's their genre.

Gena: 00:05:08

That's their, that's what they have created and that's what they're doing.

Gena: 00:05:11

But I automatically think of the meet cute in the movie where the girl has

Gena: 00:05:17

got something super heavy in her hands and she turns, and she of course,

Gena: 00:05:22

bumps into the billionaire because she's the overworked woman and she

Gena: 00:05:29

hits the billionaire and loses all her packages or whatever, and he sits

Gena: 00:05:34

there and helps her gather 'em all up.

Gena: 00:05:36

And then they have this moment where they lock eyes and they have this connection.

Gena: 00:05:43

I admit I watch some of those movies myself and they're fun.

Gena: 00:05:47

But that is a cliche.

Christopher: 00:05:48

It's a cliche and I think the reason it's a cliche is

Christopher: 00:05:51

because everyone does it the same way.

Christopher: 00:05:54

It's always the woman has the files or the papers.

Christopher: 00:06:00

She always runs into the man.

Christopher: 00:06:02

The papers hit the floor, they bend down, and then their eyes catch

Christopher: 00:06:06

each other on the way up, right?

Christopher: 00:06:08

It's done the same way every time, and I've seen it done in books that way too.

Christopher: 00:06:13

So what you want to do is you may need that meet cute moment, right?

Christopher: 00:06:17

You may need that moment where the characters first fumble into each other,

Christopher: 00:06:22

but that doesn't mean you have to do it the way that everyone has done it.

Christopher: 00:06:26

You can find a creative way, think, how can I make my characters meet without the

Christopher: 00:06:31

carrying the papers fall scene, right?

Christopher: 00:06:33

How can I do something that's the same emotion, the same result, but

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comes at it in a fresh new light?

Christopher: 00:06:44

And that I think, is our challenge as writers, is to be creative like that,

Christopher: 00:06:48

to say I'm gonna turn this cliche on its head and make it to where the reader

Christopher: 00:06:53

doesn't even really realize that's what just happened, even though it did or

Christopher: 00:06:58

won't realize until after they've passed it that, oh, that's like where they,

Christopher: 00:07:02

you know that's the meet cute, right?

Christopher: 00:07:04

If you're analyzing it, but you may not realize it right away.

Gena: 00:07:07

Absolutely, and that's the thing I think when you're talking

Gena: 00:07:10

about the just individual words or lines, that kind of thing that's

Gena: 00:07:15

the thing that you can come back to.

Gena: 00:07:16

That's the thing that when you are editing, maybe you write it that with the

Gena: 00:07:20

cliche the first time you go through it.

Gena: 00:07:22

But when you come back, and this is fiction, non-fiction,

Gena: 00:07:25

this is article, blog, book.

Gena: 00:07:27

It doesn't matter.

Gena: 00:07:29

But you come back to it and you say, okay, that's a cliche, how can

Gena: 00:07:34

I say that in a new original way.

Gena: 00:07:36

So that's gonna happen at the editing phase.

Christopher: 00:07:38

Instead of once upon a time, you sit and look at

Christopher: 00:07:41

it and you go how about a long time ago in a galaxy far away?

Christopher: 00:07:44

And suddenly you're saying that's the same thing, right?

Christopher: 00:07:46

It's basically saying the same thing.

Christopher: 00:07:48

But when George Lucas wrote that for Star Wars, it took

Christopher: 00:07:51

on a whole new, fresh feeling.

Gena: 00:07:54

Yes, definitely.

Gena: 00:07:55

Now when you're writing long form story this is the kind of thing that's gonna

Gena: 00:08:00

happen more on the front end, right?

Gena: 00:08:02

When you're really thinking it through and you're really

Gena: 00:08:04

planning and you're developing.

Christopher: 00:08:05

I think so.

Christopher: 00:08:06

I would like to get that scene created correctly in the plotting phase.

Christopher: 00:08:11

But I'm a plotter, right?

Christopher: 00:08:12

So I like to make sure that, okay, I'm gonna plot that out, make sure

Christopher: 00:08:16

I've got that meet cute happening in a way that isn't traditional.

Christopher: 00:08:19

But that said, don't let that stop you from moving on.

Christopher: 00:08:23

It's totally fine if you wanna do the way it's always been done, and

Christopher: 00:08:27

then go back in the editing phase and say, okay, this scene needs

Christopher: 00:08:31

to be a little fresher, something more exciting needs to happen here.

Christopher: 00:08:34

And then you change it up and build it up.

Christopher: 00:08:37

And sometimes then you can tie that in to a scene later in the book

Christopher: 00:08:41

that will really become meaningful.

Christopher: 00:08:43

And then the whole thing takes on a whole new light.

Gena: 00:08:45

We should definitely do a podcast about tiebacks.

Gena: 00:08:47

Because we use them, quite a bit in, you can use them in fiction,

Gena: 00:08:51

you can use 'em in non-fiction, you can use them in an article.

Gena: 00:08:54

You can use them in a blog.

Gena: 00:08:55

It doesn't matter.

Christopher: 00:08:56

That's a teaser.

Christopher: 00:08:57

We'll do that one for sure.

Gena: 00:08:58

We'll do that one for sure.

Gena: 00:08:59

Tiebacks, weaving those things in.

Gena: 00:09:02

So yeah, we'll look at that.

Christopher: 00:09:03

So cliches can be words, like once upon a time .Cliches can be scenes

Christopher: 00:09:08

like the meet cute, but cliches can also be the entire structure of your story,

Christopher: 00:09:14

which can be a little scary, honestly, to think that, okay, am I writing

Christopher: 00:09:19

something that's already been done?

Christopher: 00:09:20

And the truth is, almost everything has been done, but you can

Christopher: 00:09:24

still write it in a fresh way.

Christopher: 00:09:26

And so one of the things that we were talking about earlier was who uses formula

Christopher: 00:09:32

so well, and has almost turned them into a cliche, and that's Hallmark, right?

Christopher: 00:09:38

They do that with Hallmark movies.

Christopher: 00:09:40

They have got a formula that they use and you expect certain things

Christopher: 00:09:44

to happen in a Hallmark movie, but it works for them because that's

Christopher: 00:09:48

their formula and that's Hallmark.

Christopher: 00:09:49

But there are other competitors now who've come on the scene who

Christopher: 00:09:53

like, Amazon Prime or other services that decide, oh, we want to create

Christopher: 00:09:57

something that's like a Hallmark movie.

Christopher: 00:09:59

So they take a similar formula and they try to do the same thing, but because

Christopher: 00:10:04

it's not under the Hallmark brand, it doesn't come across as formulaic.

Christopher: 00:10:09

It comes across as cliche, it's like they're copying Hallmark.

Christopher: 00:10:13

And so what they need to do is they need to say, how can we change the structure

Christopher: 00:10:17

of this to give it a twist, give it something unique that's different, that

Christopher: 00:10:23

separates us from that industry standard.

Gena: 00:10:26

They do, and they start bringing in different types of meet cutes.

Gena: 00:10:29

If you want to have a kind of a fun exercise for yourself, go ahead and watch

Gena: 00:10:33

a Hallmark movie and then watch an Amazon movie and look for the differences.

Gena: 00:10:37

Look for the ways that they've tried to freshen it up, or ways they've

Gena: 00:10:40

tried to make it more their own.

Christopher: 00:10:43

I really encourage you with those, not only to watch them,

Christopher: 00:10:46

but, and watch 'em back to back.

Christopher: 00:10:48

But sit down with a piece of paper and outline them as they happen,

Christopher: 00:10:52

what happens in what order in this?

Christopher: 00:10:54

And you'll see that there is a definite correlation between, if you pick two

Christopher: 00:10:58

romantic movies, there's gonna be a definite correlation between those.

Christopher: 00:11:02

If you pick two adventure movies, un that have happened over time,

Christopher: 00:11:04

you're gonna find correlations.

Christopher: 00:11:06

But then you can also see where they vary and where they diverge from the norm, and

Christopher: 00:11:11

that's where it just becomes fascinating.

Gena: 00:11:12

That's great.

Gena: 00:11:13

So today we are talking about helping you identify and

Gena: 00:11:17

avoid cliches in your writing.

Gena: 00:11:20

Whether that is in fiction or non-fiction, just in any form.

Gena: 00:11:24

Look for those things that have been.

Gena: 00:11:26

Look for those things that have been overdone.

Gena: 00:11:29

Look for those things that are no longer fresh and come up with a more creative

Gena: 00:11:32

way of saying that or completing that.

Christopher: 00:11:35

Absolutely.

Christopher: 00:11:36

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Christopher: 00:11:37

If you did, please rate, review, subscribe, and share

Christopher: 00:11:41

with someone that you know.

Christopher: 00:11:42

It really helps if you subscribe to it because then you won't miss the

Christopher: 00:11:45

next one when we talk about what did we just say we were gonna talk about?

Gena: 00:11:48

We were gonna talk about, what are we gonna talk about?

Christopher: 00:11:51

The tiebacks

Gena: 00:11:52

The tiebacks.

Gena: 00:11:53

Talk about tiebacks.

Christopher: 00:11:54

I need to write it down.

Christopher: 00:11:55

We're gonna do tiebacks in one of our upcoming episodes here.

Christopher: 00:11:57

And if you don't wanna miss that, and I strongly recommend you

Christopher: 00:12:00

don't, because it's such a powerful writing technique, subscribe.

Christopher: 00:12:03

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Christopher: 00:12:07

get notified when the next episode comes out and you won't miss a thing.

Christopher: 00:12:11

So we thank you so much for joining us.

Christopher: 00:12:13

We appreciate it.

Christopher: 00:12:14

We love you guys.

Christopher: 00:12:15

You're awesome.

Christopher: 00:12:16

And remember that what Gena?

Gena: 00:12:18

Together we have writing Momentum.