Cliché Okay, or So Passé?

Every writer tells you to purge clichés from your prose (and I will too), but then those same writers go ahead and use clichés in their own books. Sadly, I have too. That’s not due to intentional hypocrisy; it’s just that the nasty critters are so darn hard to eradicate.

What’s a cliché? It’s an overused expression or phrase. Before becoming a cliché, the short collection of words started out being clever. The original author discovered a compact, understandable, shorthand way of stating an id...