Battling Clichés & Tired Tropes: 5 Ways to Let Out a Breath

It’s an age-old writers’ question: What do I do about clichés and well-worn tropes? This month, we’ve asked authors about the clichés and tropes they find themselves falling back on, and how they fix, invert, or embrace them. Today, Kelly Loy Gilbert, author of the forthcoming Conviction, offers five ways to rewrite a cliché:

CLICHÉ: Letting Out A Breath

Clichés in stories are fantastic placeholders as you’re writing—they serve as emotional shorthand—but, if overused, they can stunt your characters’ growth and development.  Consider the following mini-scene:

He lifts his wand, and the floors curl away from the walls and towards me. He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says.

I can’t breathe. “No.”

“I can’t breathe” works double-time here: it’s a pause, a place for the reader to hold still a moment waiting in suspense for the answer, and it also gives us an emotional undercurrent that runs through the whole scene.  As readers we recognize “I can’t breathe” to mean the narrator is afraid, and so we read the scene infused with the narrator’s fear.

Clichés are economical that way.  But it’s in these small moments that we have the opportunity to bring our characters to life and make them specific and individual and unique, and there are richer, stronger ways to both provide that basic emotional information and also allow the reader a deeper glimpse into your characters’ hearts and thoughts.

Here are five other tools to set the emotion of a scene:

Filter the scene through your character’s emotional state. What does she notice? What ordinary (or extraordinary) sights and sensations around her take on a different meaning for her because of her emotional state?

He lifts his wand.  The floors curl away from the walls and towards me, pressing in threateningly like they mean to suffocate me. He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says.

“No.”

Flash back to a memory. What was the first time she felt whatever it is she’s feeling now? What was the most striking time? What is she remembering?

He lifts his wand, and the floors curl away from the walls and towards me. He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says, and I feel again that fear when my brother would hold me underwater so long I was certain I was drowning and would come up gasping and clawing at the air.

“No.”

Make a generalization that reveals something of your character’s ideas or beliefs. What does she believe in? How does her worldview align with, or clash with, her feelings now? Can you tease out her feelings by having her make generalized statements?

He lifts his wand, and the floors curl away from the walls and towards me. He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says.

The best wizards, the ones worth becoming, never show even the most suffocating fear. “No.”

Root the feeling in the body.  Emotions wreak all kinds of havoc on our bodies.  What does the moment physically feel like for her?  

He lifts his wand, and the floors curl away from the walls and towards me.  He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says.

There’s a piercing feeling like a hole in my chest where my lungs are supposed to be. “No.”

Find another way to say it. If you can write a novel in thirty days, you can certainly reach for enough new words to put a gripping, vivid new spin on the feeling.

He lifts his wand, and the floors curl away from the walls and towards me.  He watches me.

“Are you afraid?” he says.  

The truth is that the fear is snaked around my throat, choking away my breath.  I say, “No.”

Ultimately, it’s those characters you inhabit most deeply who will be most deeply felt by your readers.  So be fearless in moving away from the dependable and the well-worn, and in giving your characters voice and thoughts and feelings that could belong only to them.

Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of  Conviction , a young-adult novel about family and loyalty and an impossible choice, coming from Disney-Hyperion in May.  She lives in the SF Bay Area (go Giants!) and loves chatting about all things books, teens and Friday Night Lights. You can find her as @KellyLoyGilbert on Twitter.