Irony — The Final Cliché
By David Corbett | March 6, 2015 |
Film Star Vintage
Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake
“The Blue Dahlia” (George Marshall, 1946)
Next week I’ll be moderating a panel at Left Coast Crime in Portland titled, “The Taste of Copper, the Smell of Cordite: Clichés in Crime Fiction.”
This topic in one form or another crops up just about every year, making the panel itself a kind of cliché. I’ve heard Martyn Waite deride the jazz-loving detective, and Karin Slaughter bemoan sex scenes where all the male hero has to do is, basically, show up.
Someone sooner or later mentions the smoky-voiced, sex-soaked femme fatale who bears a greater resemblance to Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle than to any living, breathing woman. And Chandler’s old saw, “When you get stuck, just send somebody through the door with a gun,” is always good for a brisk flogging. (Why not send him in with a dowsing rod, or a flaming parrot, or a penis pump?)
But as I began to organize my thoughts for this thing, I realized that in all the general writing conferences I’ve attended, I have never – never, not once – seen a panel titled “Clichés in Literary Fiction.”
Why is that?
[pullquote]Perhaps the greatest cliché in literary fiction involves not phrasing or character, setting or plot devices, but tone. I mean, of course, irony.[/pullquote]
Does literary fiction present such a broad range of human experience – beyond what one finds, for example, down the nearest mean street, or inside the average police station – that it doesn’t need to revisit the same predictable situations over and over?
Please. I wish to introduce Exhibit A: the middle-aged college professor (or the housewife with a degree in Comp Lit) contemplating an affair.
Are perhaps the writers of literary fiction so advanced in craft and lofty of mind they never succumb to a commonplace phrase?
If only. Admittedly, these kinds of lapses are harder to find in literary fiction, due to the premium placed on language. But the need for novelty of expression can itself become banal. More than one writer, while chasing the butterfly of felicitous expression, has tripped over something simple and sturdy. One can always detect the ineffable in the ordinary if one looks carefully enough.
But perhaps the greatest cliché in literary fiction involves not phrasing or character, setting or plot devices, but tone. I mean, of course, irony.
[pullquote]The terror of being found out, the aversion to saying or believing or, worst of all, expressing something others deem hackneyed or naïve, permeates literary fiction in a way that genre fiction seems to escape.[/pullquote]
Now I realize poor, defenseless irony has taken quite a beating in some quarters. John Gardner gave it a good thrashing in On Moral Fiction, for example. And we probably all remember the talking heads of TV news, in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, announcing with stern, patriotic conviction that, “The Age of Irony is dead.” As though the World Trade Center hadn’t been leveled by terrorists but by a particularly devastating double entendre.
A far more insightful (and more honest) critique of the ironic tendency can be found in a wonderful essay titled “E Unibus Pluram,” by David Foster Wallace.
You can find this essay online, and I highly recommend reading it. (And re-reading it – you’ll need to.) Wallace makes a great many excellent points but his central thesis is that the generation of writers that grew up with TV, as well as those who came after, even more than the mid-century postmodern ironists such as Barth and Pynchon and DeLillo, came to artistic consciousness as “oglers,” chronic watchers who spent so much time before the small screen that they acquired, knowingly or not, a disposition that was essentially, self-consciously that of an observer rather than a participant.
Not only that, this self-conscious awareness of looking at the world rather than taking part in it became inherently infected with the notion: I’ve seen this all before.
And it’s not much of a hop, skip or jump from there to I’m too hip to fall for that.
As Wallace himself puts it:
“[T]he most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naivete.”
Irony, in this sense, with its attitude of “passive unease and cynicism,” provides a kind of armor against cliché. Or so its advocates would like to believe. But this attitude has become so pervasive it’s become a kind of pose. And a pose is just the behavioral equivalent of a cliché.
The terror of being found out, the aversion to saying or believing or, worst of all, expressing something others deem hackneyed or naïve, permeates literary fiction in a way that genre fiction seems to escape.
There’s, of course, something admirable in that. As the novelist Joy Williams says, “A writer should write in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about.”
But this suggests a subtle, sneaky truth. The way to avoid being considered ignorant of what the world is all about is to engage with it, not watch it on TV. To experience life, not settle for an idea of it.
I don’t believe genre’s relative indifference to cliché results from the fact it’s more market-driven and thus willing to embrace the stereotypical, usually in a quest for a wider audience (though that’s not beyond consideration).
Nor do I think it’s because genre writers are just too stupid to get it (or their readers are).
I think it has more to do with the difference between the ivory tower and the real world, academia and ground zero. The former prizes ideas, the latter experience.
In the realm of ideas, virtually anything can seem trite if expressed one too many times. In the realm of experience, however, a person comes across something for the first time only once, which is both so obvious as to be tautological and yet also weirdly profound. Ideas persist through time; experience does not. And if, as a reader, you’re more focused on the experience being recounted than the idea of it, you’re more likely to cut the writer some slack.
This is why the greatest cure for the cliché flu is a quick trip outside. The real world changes. The real world is complex and unstable. With every breath, something is at stake. Risk and threat lie in wait. Hope and love and success are tenuous. Meaning is elusive. The idea of ants crawling across a dead squirrel may seem like a cliché. Until you look at it from the squirrel’s perspective.
Genre fiction’s comfort level with cliché, and its relative lack of irony, may result from its rooting itself in simple, straightforward things that happen in the real world. People crave love (romance). They hurt each other (crime, horror). Technology increasingly dictates our lives (science fiction). The chains of habit and routine create a craving for the strange and the unknown (fantasy).
These genres fall into cliché when they lose touch with the real world experiences that inspire their reason for being – when they fall into formulaic lockstep with the idea of that reality, which is easier to market than the experience itself.
[pullquote]The way to avoid being considered ignorant of what the world is all about is to engage with it, not watch it on TV. To experience life, not settle for an idea of it.[/pullquote]
In a recent post here at Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass said something to the effect that he looks for work that clearly reveals a writer passionate about her subject matter and story. Passion is another antidote for irony. Passion inherently risks being laughed at, being mocked, being taken for a fool. Because who but a fool would feel so deeply about anything?
Hopefully, you.
What clichés drive you particularly nuts? Do you think literary fiction is largely cliché-proof? How do you avoid cliché in your own work?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
I’ll admit to a bit of squirming while reading your essay, David. Until the end, anyway. After all, I could be the poster boy for the wearers of sleeves with hearts on them. My characters’ viewpoints are decidedly not ironically detached. When folks talk about hackneyed tropes, I tend to squirm, as well. I can usually see the at least the ghosts of those tropes in my work.
Then I remind myself that I was searching for the roots of tropes I find interesting in the first place. I’d read quite a bit of epic fantasy, and was asking myself what I loved about it, why it moved me. Then I read historian Peter Heather’s claim that the Goths were the first of the so-called barbarous Germanic migratory tribal groups in Europe to quickly assimilate others and define themselves as a nation, loosely based on language. Was this the first of the post-imperial Germanic kingships that dominated western medieval Europe, that so many epic fantasy stories seemed fixated upon? If so, why? What’s so interesting about them? How did they figure in Europe’s reconfiguration after what St. Jerome termed the extinguishing of the bright light of the world (the fall of Rome)? Why is the mythos of these kingships a trope? Etcetera.
I don’t think I’ll ever be accused of lacking passion for the topic. Hackneyed, maybe. Maybe even romantic or sentimental. But not lacking in passion. It’s always good to go back to the roots, and take a look at what’s come of them—how things measure up to intentions at inception. So thanks for giving me lots to think about on a Friday. Best wishes for your panel!
Hi, Vaughn:
When I started writing my response (see below), you were the only comment up, and so I made my usual mistake of just adding a new comment rather than a reply. Oops. Sorry for the confusion.
I agree with you, David. I do think there’s a swath of literary fiction that feels as if it is after the same thing (which may make it a directional rather than a stylistic cliche) and that’s a certain obscurity wrapped up in sonorous sentences. The famous (or infamous, if you’ve paid for an MFA) essay “A Reader’s Manifesto” goes into this in great detail.
And I’m with you on life experience. I recall an interview with Darryl Ponicson (The Last Detail) and how he went into the Navy because he wanted to “see the world” so he could write about it truly. That used to be what writers wanted to do. At least go somewhere for some time and soak in a different reality (e.g., like Kesey did for Sometimes a Great Notion). For what does someone who has grown up in a 22-year-old bubble have to say? I suppose there are good novels about the bubble itself, but that’s a one-off. Then what?
Hey, JIm:
The reason I became a PI was exactly to acquire my “years at sea.” It was a deliberate choice on my part. And I think, humbly, it may have paid off.
I’ll hunt down that essay. Thanks, my fellow Californian, for getting up early and chiming in. (I love this time of the morning.)
Thanks for reminding us what matters. The literary greats that make up the graduate school canon may have used irony as a tool, but their works were filled with passion and experience. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were certainly ironic, but the pain the audience experiences blows that irony away. When irony is used to protect the writer from accusations of being naive, all that passion is lost.
Hi, Judy:
You make an important point. Irony as a dramatic method — have a character pursue something passionately, only to get the exact opposite of what he bargained for– is a great device. it tends to be a better approach for comedy and satire than drama, but you’ve chosen perhaps one of the greatest dramatic examples imaginable.
But underlying this method is an insight into mankind, that we’re intrinsically deluded, that desire is vanity (or folly), and we’re all in one sense or another fools.
With humility and compassion, that’s a biting but salutary analysis of the human condition. Used as a mere attitude to escape criticism, it becomes cliche.
Another great point: a genuine dramatization of pain or suffering reveals irony as pretty thin gruel.
Thanks!
What an exceptional essay! As I work on my latest novel, which strives to straddle literary and genre, the struggle to avoid irony has been at the top of my thoughts. I am so tired of the world-weary voice, but a voice that is too earnest is equally unappealing. You have given me so much food for thought – thank you!!
Hi, Kim:
You’re most welcome. I’m a bit of a tweeter too, striding crime and mainstream or literary fiction, and my difficulty has always been making situations that the genre has depicted thousands of times feel fresh and unique. My guiding light has always been Richard Price. Sometimes having another writer who defines for you how to do it right can be a great guide. I often even imagine RP reading the book — boy, is THAT a sobering (but helpful) exercise.
Good luck with the book!
BTW: I meant tweener, not tweeter. Autocorrect to the “rescue.” Sigh…
Hey Vaughn:
Exactly what I set out to so: Make my new friend squirm. (Yikes, as St. Jerome would say.)
I’m a big fan of the so-called Dark Ages, and am doing a lot of research on the period for no other reason than I think it’s utterly fascinating. (This phrase came to me as you were describing the period as the foundation of Epic Fantasy: Putting the Care back in Carolingian.)
I of course do not equate passion with cliche or trope. Nor do I think any genre, epic fantasy or what have you, is inherently more cliched than any other. I remember reading a book when I was around 10 or 12 about an Irish mercenary in the late Middle Ages. He had a deformed arm from a battle wound, and was basically just an ordinary foot soldier, not a king or a knight, etc. And though I’ve long forgotten the name of the book and the author, I continue to remember that character. Because his viewpoint was unique and compelling. Subject matter does not create cliche. Execution does.
I do believe passion is more likely to engage the reader than ironic detachment. Unless, of course, the passion blinds the writer to cliched thinking and feeling and conception.
The key, as in all writing, is to imagine vividly, value detail, resist the obvious, and think and feel deeply. I’d frankly be a bit surprised if you weren’t a wee bit guilty of all these marvelous things.
Thanks for commenting. Sorry if the essay put you off.
No worries, David – I’m fully aware that my squirming is self-inflicted. And I can see your good intentions here for writers like me. Thanks again for the excellent observations and the provocation! Enjoy the day!
Excellent article. When a writing student has trouble with a story, I often hear myself telling him or her, “Your book is a journey. The readers wants to live the experience with you. Get as much down as you can on the first draft because only once can you have an experience for the first time.” The best stories let us live in another world. The don’t keep us from experiencing it.
Thanks, Susan. Sometimes the best thing to remember is that we’re writing for a reader, and to take the reader seriously. I wonder if both the tendency toward cliche and the avoidance of cliche don’t result from too great a focus on the writer.
Your warnings against irony and the pomposity of some literary fiction are well taken. It’s always a matter of balance, isn’t it?
On the other side of the scale lie pitfalls also. I wonder, as I struggle in the arena of faith-based fiction, how to avoid cliche, formula, and plot lines that are shaped by philosophy rather than by reality. Passion abounds, perhaps, but this genre could be greatly served by fresh language as well as by doing just what you recommend: getting onto the street, finding real people, and laying bare the human heart in all its duplicity, neediness, and capacity for love.
Hi, Edi: Excuse my goofing this up. My reply to your comment is a little lower in the comment thread.
Thank you for this inspiring essay.
In our war against cliche, I feel many writers fall into an overly observational frame in an attempt to craft “deep” characters who are above the commonness of the world.
Yet this is the antithesis of what a reader wants. A reader wants to go with the protagonist, not watch with him/her. In so doing, writers forget to propel their protagonist forward with the most elementary of story-telling devices: a physical goal.
Maybe there is a fear of the cliche, or of an accusation of being “petty”, but life is a chain of pursuits of physical goals. And unless the protagonist is desperately pursuing his/her own physical goal, and doing so in an inherently flawed manner, the story will have no momentum – and likely no readers.
Hi Noah:
Although I believe an outer goal is essential to creating movement and momentum, I’m not sure I’d typify that goal as necessarily physical. Reconciling with an estranged parent is an outer goal but is it physical per se? And I think Don would agree with me that the outer goal is always motivated by an inner need, which is perhaps even more instrumental in kicking the character into action than the outer goal. (It’s certainly key to maintaining the character’s movement forward despite the conflict he faces.)
But I definitely agree that a character who merely observes can easily fall into the trap of ironic hipper-than-thou. I don’t think that’s deep, though. I think it’s pretty shallow compared to those who, as you say, engage with the world.
Yes, I agree. The inner goal finds its external expression in the outer goal. Of course that isn’t always how it comes out in drafting a novel. For some plot comes first. For others, at first, there is no plot.
I say the inner and outer journeys can arrive in any order. One can dig into plot events and find the inner meaning, a technique I teach. Or one can externalize inner flux through action. Either way the important thing is that they connect to and reflect each other.
Thank you for the responses, gentleman! I agree with Don – this essay transcends a “blog post” by a mile.
Reconciling with an estranged parent is a great example of how physical and internal goals intertwine. And while a deep emotional and relational need will drive the protagonist internally, the reader will need physical markers to recognize the protagonist’s progress toward that goal. Many writers neglect these necessary details, focusing too heavily on the emotions and ideas, ignoring the way we measure life progress through physical acquisition, connection, and intimacy.
In this example, that could be a hug, a letter, a spoken word, an apology from the parent. Worse for the story, the estranged parent will begin to want to reconcile too, and will ‘happen’ to reconcile with the protagonist, the protagonist having done no acting or pursuing whatsoever. Sure, a story may chronicle both characters pursuing each other, but both would still need to act on this desire and not just ‘wait’ for the other to show up.
For newer/novice writers, the temptation will be to gravitate too strongly either toward that detached, ironic voice, or the plot-marching physical. Rather, we need to see the inherent harmony between physical goals and those from within, and how character flaws and actions fuel the energy between them.
Hi, Edi:
When Mark wrote what is now regarded as the first of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew is now widely considered the second), the message he wanted to impart was so revolutionary many didn’t want to hear it: the Messiah we expected was a liberating, vindicating king. The one who actually appeared lived among us simply, and was crucified like a common criminal. Sometimes it really is helpful to ask: What would Jesus do?
Good luck with the book.
David-
Great essay. (It transcends the label “blog post”, ask me.) I have wondered whether the prevailing ironic, detached outlook on life is a generational attribute, most noticeable in Gen X, Y and Millennial folks.
I see now that its cultural roots are deeper, going back to the Atomic Age and the dawn of TV. Or maybe it goes back further still, to the Enlightenment? 18th Century satire, like all satire, engaged by disengaging.
I would only add this: In fiction irony is not exclusive to literary fiction. It’s all over genre fiction as well. The detached, ironic narrator is everywhere. Witty, snarky, faux-passionate, seeming-to-care-while-sounding-uncaring…the narrative voice of our times has become a sugar rush that has begun to make me–maybe all of us–ill.
Why has ironic narration taken hold in our times? It’s a response to our times, yes, but it’s also easy. It’s what everyone else is doing and what sells. What began as authentic now feels hackneyed.
Holden Caulfield is an example of a detached narrator who nevertheless conveys care and passion. That’s one reason he endures where hundreds (thousands?) of contemporary ironic narrators feel disposable and will likely be forgotten.
So I guess a deeper lesson may be that it isn’t the use of irony per se that cheapens and starves narration, it’s lack of heart. Which I think is what you’re saying.
Off I go to join the Navy and see the world. Or maybe not. (Wait, was that ironic?)
Wish I was sitting in on your session at Left Coast. Sounds great.
Hey, Don:
Thanks for the kind words. I think irony works least for those who’ve had a job in the real world that obliged responsibility for someone else. I’m a big fan of black humor, it’s almost required when you work in the justice system, but the antidote was never forgetting that someone’s livelihood, freedom, or life was at stake in every case I worked on.
If we’re going to try to find the root cause of irony in satire, we might as well go all the way back to Aristophanes. What could be more ironic than Cloud Cuckooland?
As I say above in my response to Judy’s comment, irony as a dramatic device is perfectly legitimate and often profound. As an attitude it grows tiresome quickly. I think it pervades our time for exactly the reason you mention: it’s easy. That troubles me.
What a great discussion here today! I hear that ubiquitous snarky narrator in people around me, in their FB comments and conversations at coffee shops (yes, I eavesdrop). “A response to our times,” as Don said, above. Our culture does encourage it. Everyone seems to be ‘on’ all the time, and I’m guessing that people see a refection of their own coolness in these cookie-cutter characters. This gives deeper meaning to the notion of ‘Breakout Fiction’ for me. If art imitates life, then you could make the argument that real passion is a dying animal. I love what you said about the squirrel, BTW. I think empathy is in short supply these days, too. As writers, I know we want to entertain, but at the same time, we hopefully can enlighten. The question for me is, do we define the times we live in, or are we letting the times define us? .
Hey Susan:
I’m not sure whether we define the times or they define us, but I do sense the abyss looking back at me.
And yeah, the constant need to be on that social media seems to have kicked into overdrive, the constant need to be interesting, to be clever and glib (I’m as guilty as anyone else on the planet btw) has created a whole new zeitgeist of superficiality that at times feels almost cosmically cringeworthy.
That’s why I admire Don Winslow and Daniel Woodrell for avoiding that whole schmeer and just writing great books.
Brilliant essay. Great insights. Donald Maass is right; this is no ordinary blog post. Thank you Mr. Corbett for helping me to understand why my 23-year-old daughter has such a dark outlook, why irony seems to have bled into cynicism with many of her generation and the one preceding it. Both you and Mr. Maass give me cause for hope however. Even as you point out the ease of irony and the danger when irony is adopted as a general attitude, I must believe that if I scratch a little, that heart Mr. Maass mentions as necessary to lasting and memorable narrative still beats, as it always has….One hopes that time will pan out the heartlessly ironic literary dross … though I probably reveal myself naive in wishing so, and would decry any further elevation of the hackneyed and trite. Off to read that David Foster Wallace essay now, and share it with my daughter.
Hi, Jeanne:
When I was about your daughter’s age, I was enrolled in the graduate linguistics program at UC Berkeley. It finally dawned on me that I needed to get out of school — climb down from my ivory tower and get my nose bloodied and my heart broken. Smartest thing I ever did.
I think the principle cause of generational ennui/irony is the triviality of one’s own life compared to what one sees on TV and in film. There’s a remedy for that, as I mention above: Get off the couch, get out of the house, do something, take a risk, make something of your life. Be willing to fail at something important.
Good luck. And if your daughter gets bogged down in the DFW essay — it’s a bit of a slog, and his ideas tend to swirl around before settling down — just remind her (and/or her friends) of the three words so dear to the young: Get A Life.
David–
Don Maass is right: your piece is a carefully crafted essay, not a blog post. It deserves better than I’m going to give it, but here goes.
“The aversion to saying or believing or, worst of all expressing something others deem hackneyed or naïve permeates literary fiction.” Inevitably, it also permeates academic life. I spent many years in those vineyards, so I know this firsthand.
True, popular-culture studies in universities often include courses in genre fiction. There, the work is approached not as literature, but as symptomatic or reflective of social attitudes of a certain time and place, etc. It isn’t usually treated as something in an of itself worthy of study.
That’s because academics need complex works in order to apply the sophisticated techniques and strategies of literary analysis taught to them in graduate programs. If readers can grasp something without professional handholding….
But you say that when genre fiction’s “comfort level with cliché” and lack of irony goes wrong, it’s because writers have failed to know the world in direct terms. Instead, they “fall into formulaic lockstep with the idea of that reality, which is easier to market than the experience itself.”
Question: if formulaic works are easier to sell (market) to readers, why is this so? Aren’t writers simply responding to the demands of a marketplace that prefers formulas? Or are you saying that clever marketers know how to hoodwink readers over and over?
Maybe it’s simply true that technology has led to much more work being published. Who was it said that ninety percent of everything–including novels–is mediocre? In the end, the writer must live with what s/he publishes. Sales figures aside, is the work clear-eyed and does it ring true to experience, or is it derivative, lockstep and formulaic?
Hi, Barry:
Thanks for the kind words. To be honest, I just slammed this thing out the other night. Maybe I should do that more often.
I think formulaic works are easier to market because they’re easier to condense into an elevator pitch, which is what most book reps need to convince a bookstore owner (or a chain’s main buyer) in 25 seconds or less why they should stock a particular book. The old saw “give them something familiar, just different” favors the formulaic as the foundation for innovation. Even works that defy cliche are often marketed on the basis of their concept, rather than their themes, prose, structural innovations, etc., which are much harder to cram into a pithy pitch.
I also think some writers start with concept, and expand from there. The best find a way to escape cliche and the mere “idea of reality” that I think leads so often to banality. The worst crank out iterations of types and tropes that serve the concept.
Have a great weekend.
Life is irregular and full of such variety. The moment we try to generalize, we neglect this truth. This is what makes good writing hard and bad writing easy. It takes little effort to plot down story ideas then go with it, without taking the time to counter those ideas. Anyone can write a story if they learn the nuts and bolts, but few can write a story that echoes something profound and different, something that begs to be read. In a good game of chess, one must consider with a critical move the many variations aside from what seems obvious, for the obvious moves are often the foolish ones. When we approach writing the same way, we draw on our collective pool of ignorance, otherwise known as stereotypes and cliches. Instead, good writers, like good chess players, consider all the variations. It’s hard work and it means stepping out of your comfort zone. But that is what we do. My protagonist is a weaver because I decided she would be when I met her, but I don’t know a darn thing about weaving. So guess what? I went to a weaving studio and now every Tuesday I work on the loom and learn from the brilliantly wise mentor there who has taught me just how ubiquitous textiles are in our history. Stepping outside of this comfort zone has not only connected me to a cool hobby (I finished my first scarf last week, and now am learning to do tapestry!), but it has connected me to a whole new level of my protagonist, stepping outside of tropes and instead stepping deeper into understand just what it truly means to be someone else and to bring their truth to others.
John — I love this. Couldn’t agree more or say it better. The great antidote to cliche is experience — and detail. Thanks — and merry weaving!
David,
As a genre writer who, at the moment anyway, is surrounded by literary types, I salute you! And go much better armored into the fray.
thanks.
Thanks, Shanda. You too. Fray those suckers.
Interesting essay – I hope I got the gist of it.
Assuming I did, while much changes in the environment of the human condition, the dynamics of it are pretty much the same now as ages ago.
Going out and experiencing life seldom produces substantially different experiences now than it did over the history of humankind, at least when addressing emotions, desires, fears, etc. The trappings may change, but the lessons are seldom something substantially new. That, perhaps, is where the value of tropes and cliches comes from.
Putting them in a different setting may net you a higher resonance rate (West Side Story vs. Romeo and Juliet), but the story, emotions, conflicts are the same, and one need not necessarily personally experience it to draw from it.
Yes, the realistically presented setting and correctly described emotions are important, and that is what may ultimately draw the audience, and yes, presenting it from purely an academic research point of view may result in missing something.
And yet, we write about worlds that do not exist, and beings who are pure fantasy. One can do so strictly from developing an imaginary psychology for the characters, but that psychology will still be rooted in our own human psychology, so its study, academic or observed, is important.
Perhaps, the academic study more so because it removes the bias of personal experience; one is hard-pressed to imagine the effect of a given characteristic on a character unless one either has that same characteristic or does a lot of research.
I don’t know about other readers/writers, but I don’t like literary fiction, never did, and don’t want to write it.
Those worlds, those characters (human or not), those memes and cliches that lets me escape, I don’t want those things to reflect the real world. I’ve seen enough of the real world.
The thropes I crave, and what I write about, reflect an imagined and better world, reflect how I wish humanity to be, and invents people who I could grow to like (something very rare in real life, at least for me).
In that, watching TV, movies, and reading are only helpful to my writing if they reflect what I want to watch, read, and write about. Stuff that let’s me escape.
That is absolutely rooted in the real world experience . . . unless you know it, you have no idea what to escape from and escape to.
. . . but maybe that does limit me; probably why I’ll never get published. But that’s OK; I have my own writing to read, and other accomplishments to satisfy my ego and self-worth.
Hi, EJ:
What I run across a lot in my teaching and editing (and more of my for-fun reading than I’d like) are stories based on stories. The characters are types derived form other types and they’re basically a rehash of what’s been written before, with some usually minor or even inconsequential “twist” that does little to rectify the derivative nature of the writing.
If someone can overcome the secondhand and derivative through mere study, have at it. But I must admit I’m skeptical. I see in such an approach far more opportunity to base characters on ideas of other characters than on something resembling a genuine human being.
No doubt, there’s a great deal of writing premised on exactly this approach. Some of it is wildly successful.
Also, I don’t deny that vast experience is not necessary for great writing. Flannery O’Connor seldom left her home in Millidgeville, Georgia. She wrote some of the greatest literature of the 20th century. But that’s because her understanding of both human nature and moral philosophy were profound.
Similarly, George R.R. Martin’s books probably owe a far greater debt to his study of history and Shakespeare than his most recent trip to the grocery. But his writing reveals that his study has been internalized in a profoundly personal way. He understands Shakespeare and history in his bones, not just his mind.
My point: You’re far more likely to write something derivative if you base your story on an idea of life — or other stories — rather than life itself. And even if your writing is informed by extensive study, if you don’t see the linkage between the objects of your study and the real world, you’re still at risk of creating elaborate mannikins.
I agree; the key is internalization. Could also be empathy. Being able to place oneself in the character’s situation and produce a genuine response is important, and that is helped by a deep understanding of human nature in general and of oneself. I suppose we could agree that can come from many sources.
And I also agree on the derivative nature of a lot of work. But paraphrasing an old notion, all stories have already been told. Given that humanity has changed little within the span of many, many lifetimes, aren’t all stories, heroes, villains, and even minor characters derivative?
Jim Butcher’s Dresden – both the stories and the character – seems new and fresh, but the character’s faults, his good qualities, motivators driving his actions are not novel nor previously unknown human motivators. The actions of his rivals and villains are also anchored on what are essentially modified but still human desires, ambitions, and needs.
Perhaps, and this is likely, I’m not as well-read as many others, and hence I’ve not encountered stuff that is not derivative. Then again, I restrict my reading to mostly science fiction. Actually, scratch the ‘mostly’.
Within that, one can find unique settings, but the reader in me can easily recognize, identify, and understand the characters that inhabit that new setting. Often they seem like old friends coming to visit. Some I like more than others, but none exhibit qualities that surprise me, or altogether new motivators, fears, hopes, etc.
Were they to surprise me they would be, by definition, alien. Sometimes that is exactly what authors try to do when presenting alien races. But were they truly alien, the human-alien interaction could never go beyond conflict. At some point, the reader has to recognize something, understand the motivation, and connect to the character, and that can only happen if what’s presented is recognizable to the reader. Hence, derivative of their own experiences and understanding of life.
It could be that in more literary offerings one finds truly unique and non-derivative stories and characters, but I submit my near-certainty that they will not connect with me.
Hi David,
Right now I’m resisting the urge to quote pieces of your own essay back at you – there are just too many that struck a chord.
I can fall in love with a well-turned phrase, and when I come across an idea that provokes or touches me, I’ll hoard it (like a squirrel) and turn it over and over in my mind. Actually, Gollum and his Precious springs to mind. For me, the ideas worth hoarding are the ones that come from a place of deep curiosity about ourselves, other people, and the wider world; from passion and compassion, from more than detached observation or hiding behind an ironic attitude.
‘Getting out there’, having new experiences, even if occasionally they scare me or I run the risk of appearing foolish – those are what drive my curiosity and passion for writing and love of ideas.
Can there be anything worse for a writer than the fear of being perceived as banal, derivative or cliched? (except being unread…) I think that fear can be a hobble, until we’re unable to write with true passion.
I say write amok, see where your curiosity and passion will take your story and your characters, risk being foolish and even cliched, because there is always the second, third, or tenth draft to come, where you can sober up and apply a little analysis, judgment and detachment. Well, at least that’s how your essay has inspired me to feel this evening!
Hey, Piper:
I feel like I could toss a couple excellent turns of phrase right back. You put it brilliantly — and passionately. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-scrutinized life is a prison. At some point, you have to open the door and step off the cliff waiting right outside.
I always find I’m at my truest when I allow myself to be touched and inspired by things in the real world. I also you have to read read read (as EJ makes clear above), but we live on that edge, between the imagined and the experienced. There are worse places to write from.
Thanks for the lovely post.
David –
This and Donald’s piece a day or two back are stand-out brilliant!
Thank you for the wisdom shared. Enlightening and educational.
Thanks, Tom. Donald sets a pretty high bar. And that’s a good thing.
Wonderful post. I had to chuckle when I read, “As though the World Trade Center hadn’t been leveled by terrorists but by a particularly devastating double entendre.”
Newscasters make me want to throw things at the television. I’d rather listen to Jon Stewart.
I do try to avoid cliches in my writing, but sometimes it is fun to turn one on end. “I have a mind like a steel trap.” I have a mind like a steel colander.”
Hi, Maryann:
A mind like a steel colander. How wickedly droll. How sadly true (for me, anyway). Thanks!