In this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena talk about three traps writers often fall into when writing--and how to avoid them like the plague. Make your good writing GREAT when you put these tips into practice.

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Hi, and welcome to the Writing Momentum Podcast.

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

Hey.

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

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

in just about any kind of writing.

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

entirely what you think they are.

How would you define a cliche Gena?

I would define a cliche as anything that is written.

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

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

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

That's a good way to look at it.

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

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

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

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

that people had sent in for the contest.

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

Here's the ones who don't.

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

I saw among those manuscripts.

And one of the biggest ones was the cliche.

The cliche of Once Upon A Time.

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

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

but those words have become a cliche.

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

like a fractured fairytale, right?

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

because it's been done so much.

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

that because they've become a cliche.

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

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

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

but if you do it too often, it becomes.

Cliche.

It becomes cliche and it loses its punch.

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

This can be in non-fiction as well.

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

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

me they're going to unpack something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

what maybe has become a cliche.

Yeah, to be more creative.

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

thing, but in a new and fresh way.

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

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

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

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

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

That's the thing that really grabs you.

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

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

you're writing an article or a blog post.

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

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

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

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

And so this happens a lot with individual words, but

it can also happen in scenes.

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

these also show up in movies.

In movie scenes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

there and helps her gather 'em all up.

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

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

But that is a cliche.

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

because everyone does it the same way.

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

She always runs into the man.

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

each other on the way up, right?

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

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

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

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

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

carrying the papers fall scene, right?

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

comes at it in a fresh new light?

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

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

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

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

you know that's the meet cute, right?

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

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

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

the thing that you can come back to.

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

cliche the first time you go through it.

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

this is article, blog, book.

It doesn't matter.

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

I say that in a new original way.

So that's gonna happen at the editing phase.

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

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

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

It's basically saying the same thing.

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

on a whole new, fresh feeling.

Yes, definitely.

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

happen more on the front end, right?

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

planning and you're developing.

I think so.

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

But I'm a plotter, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then you change it up and build it up.

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

that will really become meaningful.

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

We should definitely do a podcast about tiebacks.

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

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

You can use them in a blog.

It doesn't matter.

That's a teaser.

We'll do that one for sure.

We'll do that one for sure.

Tiebacks, weaving those things in.

So yeah, we'll look at that.

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

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

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

something that's already been done?

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

still write it in a fresh way.

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

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

They do that with Hallmark movies.

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

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

their formula and that's Hallmark.

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

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

something that's like a Hallmark movie.

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

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

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

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

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

separates us from that industry standard.

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

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

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

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

tried to make it more their own.

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

but, and watch 'em back to back.

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

what happens in what order in this?

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

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

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

you're gonna find correlations.

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

that's where it just becomes fascinating.

That's great.

So today we are talking about helping you identify and

avoid cliches in your writing.

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

Look for those things that have been.

Look for those things that have been overdone.

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

way of saying that or completing that.

Absolutely.

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

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

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

The tiebacks

The tiebacks.

Talk about tiebacks.

I need to write it down.

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

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You're awesome.

And remember that what Gena?

Together we have writing Momentum.