Open up your novel manuscript and see how many times you’ve used any of the common idioms and cliches in your writing. (H.W Fowler calls these “verbal twins”) * Heart and SoulĬommon idioms & cliches in creative writing Those are somebody else’s words, not yours and those have been said before. And, that’s what fresh writing is about.īeyond idioms, a cliché is an obvious, trite way of saying things. Wikipedia calls this, “figurative meaning with a common usage” and that’s why you shouldn’t use them for YOU have to break stereotypes with your writing and get your writing into an uncommon and exclusive territory. Crafty raccoons would apparently clamber trees and switch trees by jumping onto an adjoining branch of another tree leaving the dog below to, “ bark up the wrong tree.”Īn idiom is used to convey a stereotypical situation that everybody might face at some point of time. “ Bark up the wrong tree,” for instance was coined when hunting dogs were used to sniff out furry raccoons from trees. Idioms originate from the Bible, Greek mythology, Shakespeare and interesting (sometimes English) anecdotes. It’s okay in regular prose not in creative writing simply because it is not your creation. Those idiomatic phrases, those clichés – that’s what was wrong. Unfazed he lit a beedi.īetter? Wouldn’t you now want to read about the modern-day Nero in a checkered lungi (you poor king!) who smoked even as his roof came down? He stood outside his chawl in a singlet over a checkered lungi and watched the debris accumulate just as lights came on in the neighborhood. With an instinctive agility he could muster but could not explain he hauled himself out of the window in a flash just as the roof came down in a terrifying rain of steel and wood and splinters. He looked up in a daze to see what looked like little tremors from the ceiling fan. He heard the rumble of metal and concrete and an unusually loud whirring. If you thought, “so what?” about those lines, I’ve made my point. It was the dead of the night and despite having had a near-death experience he was as cool as a cucumber. He slept like a log but woke up in the nick of time before the roof collapsed on him. – From ‘The Kite Runner,’ Khaled Hosseini “ A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: Avoid them like the plague. It is pretty normal to overuse idioms and cliches in writing. When it comes to creative writing, many of the phrases that are commonly used (especially by new writers and authors) are anything but creative.
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