The Printing World is Full of Clichés,,, But Not in the Way You Might Think, says Griselda Heppel
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| Doors closed on originality? Photo by burcubyzt_85: https://www.pexels.com/ photo/vintage-wooden-door-with-distinctive- handles-36306962/ |
I can’t remember how it came up, but both Lissa Evans (a writer I greatly admire) and I were intrigued to discover the origin of the term cliché. I am rather ashamed that I never bothered to look it up before. I’d always assumed it had something to do with the French for a door closing: a boring, hackneyed phrase shutting off originality. Goodness knows where I got that notion from because it’s definitely barking up the wrong tree (an idiom, by the way, not a cliché; a nice distinction I found going down rabbit holes online… oops, there goes another).
Instead, the verb clicher means ‘to click’. Its use as a noun goes back as far as 1825 and originates from the French printing trade, where it denoted the clicking sound made when a block of print was impressed into a bath of molten type-metal to form a matrix, so that the same phrase – or even whole pages, in the case of book printing – could be printed over and over again.
And why is it that when I want to think of examples of clichés my mind goes blank, only for them to pour out of my pen (or from my keyboard) the moment I get down to writing? The temptation to start a story on the first day of the summer holidays, to have my hero set off on a mysterious journey through a land in which the grass is always lush, the rivers sparkle, the birds sing sweetly in the trees, and shelter for the night is offered by a twinkly-eyed, kindly old lady who welcomes him/her into her cottage where a log fire is burning merrily on the grate… somehow I have to get all these lazy, easily reached for descriptions out of my system before any real writing can begin.
Once upon a time there was a dark and stormy girl.
Then there’s Solar by Ian McEwan, in which the author throws every clichéd urban myth in the book at his deeply unattractive academic hero, Michael Beard, from the fight over a crisp packet with a stranger in a railway carriage to the lecturer visiting the lavatory half way through his lecture and forgetting to turn off his microphone. That a great writer should centre these tired old shaggy dog stories on his main character flummoxed me at first. I mean, did McEwan think his readers wouldn’t recognise them?
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| How to describe a beautiful sunset and bring it freshly to life. |
Hence a phrase that cropped up a lot became known as a cliché, from which it’s easy to see how it became a metaphor for a tired, overused collection of words. For writers this is a permanent challenge: how to describe a beautiful sunset or a raging lion or a cavalry charge or a broken heart in ways that bring the image freshly to life, when these things have been depicted millions of times before.
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| A log fire burning merrily in the grate. Photo by Tom Fisk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/ close-up-photo-of-a-fireplace-11751757/ |
Though I could try to do what cleverer writers than I have done: use clichés against themselves. I love how Katherine Rundell, for instance, turns perhaps the most famous literary cliché on its head by beginning her children’s novel, The Wolf Wilder, thus:
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| The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell |
Then there’s Solar by Ian McEwan, in which the author throws every clichéd urban myth in the book at his deeply unattractive academic hero, Michael Beard, from the fight over a crisp packet with a stranger in a railway carriage to the lecturer visiting the lavatory half way through his lecture and forgetting to turn off his microphone. That a great writer should centre these tired old shaggy dog stories on his main character flummoxed me at first. I mean, did McEwan think his readers wouldn’t recognise them?
Until I realised that was the point. For jaded, washed up, intellectually and morally bankrupt Beard, not even his own ‘lived experiences’ are original. A clever idea, but not a lot of fun for the reader, having to wade through so much secondhand stuff.
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| Solar by Ian McEwan |
Safer, I reckon, to take the advice of the fabled creative writing teacher, and 'avoid clichés like the plague'.
If that isn't a cliché in itself...
Enough!
Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:
and her children's books:
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