I'm worried that none of the ideas for 'original' stories I have are actually original, as I've read so many fanfictions or I talk about an idea and somebody says they've read 'indie' fics about something with the same/similar idea. I want to avoid tropes/cliches but it seems like everything I write about I end up finding out /is/ a cliche. Help?
Before I get into the meat of this, I’d like to discuss the difference between a cliche and a trope. A trope is a narrative tool such as a common plot device or character archetype that can be seen often in story telling media. A trope becomes a cliche when it is widely overused by the narrative world.
Cliches are not themselves awful and untouchable. Terry Pratchet said, “Clichés are the hammer and screwdriver in the toolbox of communication.” There’s a lot you can do with them once you become fully aware of how they’re over- and misused. For more reading, check the Cliches page on TV tropes. (WARNING! TV TROPES IS A TIME SINK!)
On one hand, it’s good that you’re actively working to get outside the box with your writing. On the other hand, you may have heard the phrase that “Nothing is original.”
I’m a little ambivalent towards that phrase. It’s true that after ages and ages of humans telling stories, just about anything you can think of has been done before. This does NOT mean, however, that your version of a story (or how you use a character archetype, plot trope, etc) has been done before. You’re the only one who can do your take on it.
So, I’d like to do some notes about both using cliches and other frequently used things in effective ways, as well as avoiding them if you chose to.
First, regarding use of cliches:
- As touched on, author interpretation is key. If you hone your writing style to a razor edge, you could retell the oldest and most played out story and it would still be an enjoyable read.
- The problem with using cliches is that the audience can instantly see that the cliche is in progress, and in general if the audience knows exactly what is going to happen, your story loses all of its tension. A villager mentions a dragon terrorizing the shepherds? You can bet the protagonist is going to either fight it or tame it. There’s no tension as the protagonist travels through the fields and encounters the dragon because the reader’s thinking “Ah yes, there’s the dragon. I knew it would turn up.” But you still want to have a story about a dragon and you have to mention it earlier in the story without it seeming like the dragon came out of no where. How can you accomplish this without the audience seeing exactly where this is going? You could conceivably play on the audiences expectations. When they’re expecting a real dragon, instead it’s a pyromaniac cultist who makes frequent sheep sacrifices and wears a paper mache dragon head. You could instead make less obvious suggestions of dragon presence. Maybe the villagers think it’s rowdy bandits that are stealing sheep and torching the land because bandits are more likely in a world that may not even realize dragons exist. Genre savvy readers will still recognize what’s going on, however. Just have a solid understanding of what the audience is expecting when the cliche appears and think of ways to subvert it.
- Tropes can be narrative shorthand. Because audiences generally have an idea of how common tropes operate, you can implement them so you don’t have to do quite so much narrative heavy lifting in some places. In short stories, you really don’t want to overburden the reader with complex world building. It isn’t necessary to have extremely in depth knowledge of the world when the reading experience is only gonna be about 30 minutes+ of their time. Using common setting tropes can give your world depth without needing to build it from the ground up. Tropes also help your reader immediately buy in to the story when you present them with familiar character archetypes or settings. Outside of short stories, this buy-in factor can help hook readers early in a longer work. I’m a lazy reader, if I encounter a book that is top heavy with complex world building, I’m not likely to power through to a point where I understand everything. Remember you can always unravel and subvert these tropes later in the story or, in the case of character tropes, untrope them with awesome character development.
- Some Tropes are so omnipresent that you really shouldn’t worry too much about using them because they aren’t easily avoided anyway. Did you know the plot line for the first Star Wars movie is probably one of the most common stories ever? So common that Joseph Cambell names his book on the topic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. While the plot line is certainly not mindblowing, it’s a tried and true one. [x]
As for avoiding tropes or other things that have been done before
- I would not be overly concerned if you can only find one or two similar works. As long as you have integrity and know you were not working derivatively, press on with your own thing. This said, some times we are subconsciously inspired by things we’ve seen. I know sometimes I’m inspired by a specific thing, forget it was something I saw and not something I came up with, and then I’m in a pickle because damn it I just regurgitated someone else’s work by accident. If you end up in that pickle too, you just might have to go back to the drawing board and redo some things, but chances are you didn’t accidentally come up with a perfect copy, so you should still be able to extract your original pieces.
- Have friends or fellow writers read your work to see if they can identify cliches you may not have noticed or known about.
- TVTropes is a good resource for finding tropes and cliches, but as mentioned IT IS AN ENORMOUS TIME SINK and you’ll sacrifice hours of your life browsing tropes. If your google powers are strong you may be able to search the thing you think is a cliche, otherwise you’ll have to risk browsing specific sections like genre, characters, etc.
- If you find something you think is too cliched to use, decide how it needs to be modified based on the advice in the above section, or replace them with different elements.
I got a little long winded there but I hope that helps. Sorry if some sentences don’t make sense I was kinda getting muddled by the time I got to the end of this haha.