How do you avoid Cliche?

[Jsc]

How do you avoid Cliche?

I'm asking because I have no idea. Lol.

As a StarWars hobby writer, just about half of my sci-fiction knowledge is utter cliche. Complete garbage that was once only sorta-kinda cool. Like this: My protagonist is usually a pale-skinned 20-something female of exotic proportion with special abilities she learns to appreciate by being thrown into ridiculous situations every weekly episode. Naturally she survives via a plot-twist to tell a moral tale of how good will always triumph over evil. Tomorrow's episode will deal with an Alternate Universe to spice things up.

Yeahhh... Tell me if you've heard that one before? Haha. Disney. Call me. I've got your script.

Now. Yeah. It's StarWars. So cliche in 2015 is to be expected. That's just the territory baby. But I personally use cliche as a crutch wayyy too often. If I was a Corellian, I'd be a jerk who knows two things. Booze, guns, and girls. Oh, and I can count pretty well sober too.

So yeah. What do you do as a writer to keep your writing clear from cliche? The people I RP with, will love you for every juicy tip.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Jay Scott Clark"]

Every few months, I give myself a fairly harsh wakeup call by reading relevant parts of this. I don't always agree with it, but it's a pretty good lens for self-examination.

 

[Jsc]

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Whoa. I'll chip away at that tonight and see where it goes. Thanks dude.

 

[Nikolas Faselli]

I don't? At least not intentionally. I just make characters who I want to make, no matter whether they're cliché or not. But one thing I do is making new characters after being inspired by an amazingly awesome playby. So most of the times I find the playby first and then create a character on them. Seems to work out rather great.

 

[Jsc]

Inspiration from imagery. That's good. Thanks Ellya.

 

[Hal Terrano]

I used to worry about taking from cliché, but as time has gone on I've stopped fretting about it.

Life is full of cliché, otherwise where would we all get it from?

 

[Nyxie]

If it's fun for you and it's not disrupting anyone else's ability to have fun, does it really matter?

Random and sporadic. Sometimes I just dice-roll character concepts together from a broad range of written variables. How else do you think I got Mandalorian warrior with a background in Adult Holovideo raised on Scilla?? xD

Truth is, there are so many various personalities and paths in life that anything is actually possible.

 

[Celty Ikon]

[member="Jay Scott Clark"]

I have too much fun visualizing what my characters would do or say in a situation to give a damn about cliche

 

[Mrrew]

If I was a Corellian, I'd be a jerk who knows two things. Booze, guns, and girls.

You forgot ships!


But yeah... I don't think I do avoid cliche. i just roleplay whatever's fun to roleplay.

 

[Jsc]

Well, I'm expanding outwards from my singular character now. Outside of my character there exists cliche, because that's where my world building stops. Here. Listen. Tell me if this sounds like you've seen this before,
___

I start all of my character development threads in a bar, surrounded by aliens, who are stereotypes, there is no music, (Because I have no idea what music sounds like to aliens so I avoid it), and the ho-hum bartender is washing a glass with a rag. The story proceeds from here.

Then I read this from the next poster

He starts out his character in a bar in the caboose of a train, carefully decorated with the small bronze flying contraptions, surrounded by the yellow vapors of the patrons many spiced pipes, and tapping a shotgun against his chair to the beat of a nearby TV's melodramatic kids musical. The story proceeds from here.

___

I wrote the first one. I want to be the guy who writes the second one.

 

[Jsc]

Omg [member="Jorus Merrill"]

That link you gave me is making me feel guiltier than the time I read Miracle of Forgiveness on my Mission. This is awesome. Thanks again man.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Jay Scott Clark"]
LOL I hear that.

 

[Jorus Merrill]

[member="Jay Scott Clark"]

...and like MoF, Limyaael is perhaps best taken with a grain of salt. A wakeup call is good, but not something to base everything on, lol.

 

[Tefka]

Cliche ranks up there with "precedent" in terms of "words I do not care about nor do I let them inhibit my writing, work, or designs."

If the box is cliche, and you're always thinking outside of it, you'll never have to worry.

 

[Jsc]

[member="Jorus Merrill"]

Oh, I've noticed. These are rants. Gems. But rants none-the-less. He's venting as much as he is educating. But I'm not so much interested in the the translation, as I am the transmission, (or the unraveling of), his genuine intelligence. I'll keep was amuses me.

[member="Tefka"]

Oh. I get that. But as I set my entertainment limits tighter and tighter every day, I also must set my aspirations. I'm getting too old to enjoy the thrusting muse and roaring fires of my younger years. I'm hardening to change. Slowly. But surely. Hardening. And before I become our second, (less famous), grumpy goat? I'd better up my skill level too. Otherwise? I'll start feeling my age, rather than just looking it. Lol.

Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

 

[Tefka]

[member="Jay Scott Clark"]

I feel you on the age thing. I'm not 16 anymore. But I've got a young soul.

Or atleast that's what I tell myself when I gorge on chocolate peanut butter cookies.

 

[Bubák]

I believe many cliches come from the players trying to make their character as unique and interesting as possible to the point they create a walking stereotype that's been done to death. Nothing against those who do it, but I find those characters boring. Those attempts at making a character unique and distinguishable actually end up making the character exactly like the rest. I have seen tons of Jedi who are "tempted" by the DS, have anger issues and their players think it's so interesting and unique. Nobody would ever guess those characters will join the Sith at some point and suffer a personality flip, right? Same goes for the Sith; cartoony villains that do evil things to make sure the reader knows they are evil and also give that evil laugh! And make me yawn because they are so boring as they have no other personality than insane jerks who like being evil!

Well, how to avoid it...

I personally have characters that are pretty normal and I make them that way on purpose. None of them is a prodigy, neither a Chosen Ose, nor a Dragonborn or a Nerevarine. I don't need my chars to have some unique superpower, I don't need them to excel at everything. I simply make them as ordinary as possible. No tragic past. No tortured past. No quest for revenge. They are ordinary people who happen to be Jedi/Sith. That's it. And yes, I realize most people think my characters are bloody boring. I, on the other hand, think that "normality" makes them unique. I make them unique by not making them unique.

 

[Jsc]

[member="Elizie Adasca"]

I actually love that approach. Creating a deeper fiction by adding more Real Life too it. Adding more the of the ho-hum ordinary events of daily life actually creates a universe that thinks, feels, and breaths in much more real, relateable way. It doesn't make character's boring. It just gives them a heartbeat.

Thanks. I need to remember that more often.

 

[Adrik Turov]

Cliches are cliches for a reason. They work. By themselves there is no harm in them, as long as you always try to do something new with them. Chances are any grand new idea you come up with has been done before... and very probably been done better. Science fiction is no longer new after all. That does not stop us from taking a fresh stance on an overused topic and enjoying it. As long we we, the writers and readers, are having fun then it hardly matters how many other hundreds of people have done the same does it?

 

[Fabula Caromed]

After making a quasi-messianic machine speaker who was too good for this sinful galaxy and a couple of PTSD lab-born supersoldiers, I decided to stop caring about whether or not I was being cliche. As a result, I made Fabula, who is a completely original character with no recurring themes that anyone has ever done before in thousands upon thousands of years of human literature.

It's really hard to not be cliche when you live in a time after Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Dickens...