Episode #235: To Trope Is To Cliche, But How To Refresh?

Flashback to circa 2007-2013, when I wasn't so cynical about the world around me, and that a simple flower could brighten my mood in a given moment of time.

Using tropes and cliches in one's writing, whether you're doing it for a story or applying it to the real world, is always an adventure. In general, using them too much can show off a distinct lack of imagination, but using them too little can also show everyone that you're not afraid of being original but are hesitant in judiciously using the aforementioned items to compliment your writings.

In general, people do expect a sliver of tropes and cliches to be used in a story, but they don't want an overabundance of either being used as well. Most newbie-ish writers do struggle with that dilemma, and even established/semi-established writers struggle with it from time to time. So, with using yours truly as the proverbial guinea pig, here's how I managed to freshen up those two particular concepts by changing those square tires to something more circular.

Tropes: I was going to be a bit lighthearted writing about this, but after doing a bit of research {please click on the link for a nice informative article about it} I decided to still be lighthearted about it, but with the plot twist of being serious like a good straight man. So with that being said, off we go in the purple mauve yonder of the sky.

The basic plot of my current project boils down to this: a kidnapping and a retrieval. Simple, basic, and flavorful as a bowl of white rice staring mournfully at a salt shaker. So I got to thinking, what kind of changes can I do in order to make it more palatable to the average reader? I soon started coming up with a bunch of ideas.

1. Kidnapping: well, in the normal sense of the phrase, it's a man takes woman; let's switch it to...a woman takes man. Sounds interesting enough. Let's see if we can tweak it more. What kind of woman would simply kidnap a man? A mercenary! Well, that certainly makes it more interesting, doesn't it?
2. Retrieval: so we've established that a mercenary has kidnapped a man. But who goes after him? His...wife! His wife chases after him. Does sound a bit interesting, right? Lets spice it up by adding...his ex-wife to the mix! So now he has both his current and ex-wife chasing after him. This would definitely pique a reader's curiosity, right?
3. Reason the 1st: Well, we do have to come up with an outstanding reason for kidnapping, right? Certainly can't be something so trite like...money? jealousy? revenge? Well, we did come up with a mercenary kidnapper, so that means...they were hired by someone to do it! Okay, we're making some progress, but who? A...member of a ruling elite from a distant planet! Okay, now we're cooking!
4. Reason the 2nd: Okay, we got a primary reason set, which would certainly pique my curiosity as a reader. But what should be the underlying reason for the main reason? The member of the ruling elite in question is....a Queen! A Queen....who comes up with a plan of an internal coup d'etat that would leave her in power with....a husband at her side!

Now that we've established a juiced up story line, we can start adding all kinds of things to make this a truly memorable story jambalaya.

1. The wife is, unbeknownst to herself, an actual Queen in her own right who has her own retinue (plot twist involved with them later) to help her retrieve her husband;
2. The ex-wife is/was in a previous life, a debtor soul collector for her former enslavers, the Aztecs, just like her ex-husband, who was not enslaved, but did work for the Aztecs.
3. On the other side of the equation, the Queen is actually a half-sister to the man's current wife and hers is a matriarchal monarchy that still has men calling some of the shots and is the one who hired the mercenary to kidnap the man. Plot twist, she wants her half sister to be a co-ruler as well.
4. Among the other assorted seasonings that we added to the delicious pot of jambalaya were things like: modern day sensibilities/lifestyles; various ethnic groups and time periods, a tantalizing hint of steampunk and of course, elements of low fantasy thrown in for thickening.

So all in all, we've managed to take a basic story plot of a kidnapping, possibly gone awry, turned it almost 270 degrees and created something truly unique. Note, there are a finite number of extra tangents/subplots thrown into this story, all of which are connected to either one side or the other, which makes it taste even yummier.

Up next, cliches.

Cliches are basically words and phrases that are used figuratively, and often overused to the detriment of the story. While they're a necessary evil, more often than not, most people do not know how to use them correctly. The end result winds up being a shallow piece of glop that is being slowly starved to death due to a lack of originality.

Enter, yours truly. Way early on in the beginning of my writing journey, I used cliches, mostly sparingly, to help pump up {ha!} my stories. But I quickly discovered that in order to up my game when it came to using them, I needed to tailor them to whatever specific situations cropped up. Believe it or not, this was a really difficult challenge to undertake.

Why? Because almost every scene that I had created, always, ALWAYS, craved a snarky cliche of some kind to bring whatever particular point I wanted to drive home across the finish line. So not only did it require me to be quite judicious in using them, I had to make them very pertinent for the situation they were being inserted for. Let me give you a few examples.

1. "Do I pass the smell test?". This is one of the more traditional cliches that one will see from time to time in stories, as it's a minor variation of "How do I look?". In this particular case, for an answer, I had written a decent variation of the usual answer: "You have crushed it like an unrepentant sinner." Granted, it implies a rather graphic visual, but it gets the job done.
2. The ever popular cliche of "being thrown under the bus" was implied quite a lot throughout this story, which often necessitated the creation of more than a few variations, especially since the type of world that was created straddled both the 18th and 21st century when it came to things like transportation (horses), security (drones) and medical science (geneticists), just to name a few. One of the variations that I had created was "being thrown under a team of draught horses." Again, the visuals are very violent, but horses are the main mode of military/civilian transportation.
3. Another popular cliche that was used in this current story was, "death by a thousand cuts". This, as well as the variation of "death by a thousand paper cuts" were often used to note that someone else was going to die a very slow and maybe painful death. I tweaked it a little and created, "death by a thousand verbal cuts." Very much to the point, as I am quite fond of giving all of my characters a fantastic linguistic repertoire.

These are but a few examples of the many, many cliches that I was, for better or worse, forced to use in my current project. Fortunately for me, I have a fantastic imagination and a great working knowledge of all kinds of minutia that one could possibly need while writing. Especially when I need to create an alternative to a tired cliche (believe me, there are times when you do need to use one) that would fit seamlessly into the story, like the ones previously mentioned.

Imagination and a good working knowledge of the time period(s) of the story you're creating is the key to judiciously using cliches. It's worked for me, only because of the various time periods that I'm dealing with requires a level of attention normally not needed for the average story. It definitely doesn't mean that I like it, because I consciously go out of my way not to create the need for cliches.

*Now if you want to talk about trope-ish scenarios, then yes Houston, we do have a negative trajectory coming up the rear very fast. And that is something that might be covered in a later post, because nipping things in the bud has been an exercise in futility, but I am getting better.

I certainly hope you've enjoyed this little treatise of mine, because as they say, being a happy miser is much better than taking a completely unnecessary trip to some place else.*

*this is what I originally wanted to do for the post, but I was afraid that it would be poached somehow, so this nifty essay is what you got instead.

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