The LadyKillers

I'd Give My Right Arm to Stop Using Cliches

Staci here, racking my brain for clichés to talk about. Wait, wasn’t that one? You bet, and they’re hard to avoid. Two types of clichés permeate writing, and the first is the tried and true phrases (cliché!) that are so pervasive in everyday conversation that it’s easy to forget they’re clichés at all.

When I finished the rough draft of Going Organic, I read Don’t Murder Your Mystery for revision suggestions. Chris Roerden devoted a chapter to the dangers of clichés, warning that overusing clichés results in lazy writing. The reader will get bored, the writing won’t be fresh, and the publishers won’t be interested. Cliches in dialogue are the exception, since people in everyday life use clichés nonstop. But the others had to go. So I scratched my head, furrowed my brow, and put my nose to the grindstone, eager to ferret out all those pesky clichés.

I must have been a glutton for punishment, because my manuscript was riddled with clichés to the point of being embarrassing. Even after reading the book through again, I’m sure I missed a bunch. Let’s hope they’re all embedded in dialogue.

The other type of cliché I see constantly is character clichés. An author who shall remain nameless but is well known for lawyer books tends to make all his female characters five foot eight to five foot ten, one hundred and fifteen pounds, with long hair and trim figures. Couldn’t we just once have a petite overweight public defender? Would the halls of justice slam their doors shut on such a protagonist? Of course not. But apparently that author wants all his main characters to fit his idea of attractive, even if the description is nothing new.

Don’t get me wrong. Character cliches can be handy for the reader. When I’m introduced to a tattooed gangbanger who drives a souped-up Cadillac with chrome rims and has a heart of gold, I’m instantly oriented. When I meet a grizzled ex-cop turned private eye with a tendency to drink too much, I feel like I’m reading about an old friend. And if the writer’s good, he’ll take these familiar characters and add a twist that livens them up and sparks my interest. And if he doesn’t, then I’ll spend a large portion of the book smirking as the characters do all the things I’m expecting. If the pacing is good and the plot solid, I may even overlook the lack of originality. But that type of writing won’t make me run to the nearest bookstore and buy the next book.

How about everyone else? Do you find yourself rolling your eyes when a buxom blonde in a dress slit up to here (wherever here is) strolls into the room in Chapter 1? Or do you enjoy seeing those familiar faces?

Happy as a Clam

By Margaret Lucke

Last week I spent four idyllic days on Cape Cod.  My husband's  uncle and cousins were staying at a charming century-old house on the western shore of the Cape and invited us to visit them there. One of the property's best features is a little boathouse that sits over the water, and we spent most of the daylight hours on its deck, soaking up sunshine, reading books, watching kids and dogs splash in the shallows, and waving to passing boats. 

On morning we saw a woman making her way down the beach with a bushel basket. "She's gathering clams," one of us said.

Someone else replied, "I wonder if the clams are as happy as we are right now."

Happy as a clam. Now there's a cliché that has always puzzled me. It's such a common idiom that you'd think there was some truth to it. Yet I never understood what it is about clams that implies they're happy, or have any emotions at all.

People have suggested that the expression came about because a partially open clam gives the appearance of smiling. But frankly I don't see it.

Digging a little (for information, not clams), I found that early versions of the phrase were happy as a clam at high water and happy as a clam in the mud at high tide. In circumstances like that, the clam can't be dug up and eaten, which does seem like a good reason for it to be joyful.

On the other hand, another variation I ran across was happy as a clam in butter sauce. I'm not sure why finding itself bathing in butter sauce would appeal a clam since that's a sure sign it's about to be eaten. But at least it's a delicious way to go.

Happy as a clam first appeared in print in 1830. It quickly became a cliché. In 1848 a magazine called Southern Literary Messenger observed that the expression "is familiar to every one." In that same year the scholar and linguistics enthusiast John Russell Bartlett published his Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, with happy as a clam as one of the entries.

However, sad as a clam might be equally accurate. Last month The Huffington Post carried an entry by Mark C. Miller, in which he reported on a study of clams done at the Kerala Institute of Undersea Study in India. Claiming that the DNA of their liquid secretions is identical that of human tears, the researcher noted that clams exhibit sure signs of depression, such as immobility, a lack of in interest in their appearance, and no desire to socialize.

Okay, Miller is a humorist and was pulling our legs (there's another cliché for you). But if a clam can be happy, it's just as logical to suppose it also can be miserable.

I'd rather think that if clams have emotions, they're positive ones and happy as a clam makes sense. Still, I can't imagine that any mollusk could be as happy as we were last week, lounging on that sunny deck above the water.

Batten Down the Hatches! -- by Ann Parker

Ann Parker here, every-other-Thursday at The LadyKillers. Well, I was really looking forward to writing this post about clichés, but the impending storm back East blew all that right out of the water. (Two clichés for you, right there.)

Still, I shall soldier on with a few quick comments on clichés. First, I love them, and employ them with great and joyful abandon in my drafts. My critique partners and my editor strike them out, which is a good thing, because I find it difficult to kill these particular darlings.

Second, a cliche "now" may not have been one "back then" (which gives me a bit of an out, since I write historicals set in 1880s). Finally, I believe that I absorbed many of the sayings and clichés that my mother and grandparents used, which sound "old-timey" to me, but unfortunately, are not quite old enough. I've had to turn down many a phrase that didn't come into use until the 1920s. For instance: "We've been framed!" is from the 1920s (alas!), according to the Online Etymological Dictionary.  To keep myself from going too far astray, I use The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (Christine Ammer), the two volumes of Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (J.E. Lighter), plus all kinds of online sources, such as the aforementioned Online Etymological Dictionary.

I see I'm sliding down that slippery slope from cliches to slang, so I think I'll stop.

Meanwhile, here's a little cartoon from the Punch Almanack for 1885, that pokes gentle fun at some clichéd expressions which were overused in the popular literature of the time. Enjoy!

Thinking of all you East-Coasters, who have Mother Nature bearing down upon you... batten down your hatches, hang on tight, and here's hoping that it will all simply blow over...

News and CLICHES

News Flashes!!

• Ann Parker will join Camille Minichino, LadyKiller alum Simon Wood, and our sometime guest Cindy Sample at Bay Books in San Ramon, CA, on Tuesday eve, 7 PM.
• Michael A. Black will be at Killer Nashville next weekend, Aug. 26–28.

 

Cliches in all their forms

Starting tomorrow, all bets are off, justice is blind, and variety is the spice of life... Yes, the LadyKillers will be talking about cliches. And if you think a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, well then, be sure to drop in to and join the weeklong discussion on CLICHES.