Avoiding Cliches Like the Plague (or Why I Never Met a Cliche I Didn't Like)

Yesterday, I stopped obsessing and sent my entry for the Rose City Romance Writers' Golden Rose contest to the coordinator. I'd spent the better part of three weeks getting one critique after another on the first three chapters of Living In Sin and polishing and repolishing the thing in the hope of making it shine like a newborn baby's butt. (Actually, I've never seen a shiny newborn baby's butt and I've had three of them, but they--the babies, not their butts, LOL!--do have a really nice smell, sort of reminiscent of the famous new car smell.) Fortunately, most of the suggestions were on the order of pretty small potatoes, which may bode well for my entry. I'll find out at the end of September, I guess!

But one of the things that came out of the critiques I received had to do with a single sentence in Chapter Three. It read like this:

By the time Patrick arrived at the tavern after church, he knew the cat was out of the bag.

Now, I knew "cat out of the bag" is a cliche when I wrote it, but I had a good reason for using that cliche. Or thought I did, anyway.

You see, that expression is straight out of the lingo of the con game (it refers to an actual scam that goes back to medeival times). And a few pages later in this story, the reader is going to discover that Patrick has some serious con artist tendencies. In fact, in this chapter, Patrick actually hatches a "pig in a poke" scam (another very old one) against a couple of crooked characters who've injured his friends.

So I thought with that "cat in the bag" phrase, I was doing a nice, subtle job of foreshadowing. Except, darn it all, no one else saw it.

Well, I take that back. One of my CPs actually said it was a cliche but that it was "darn near perfect" in the context, so I think she got it. But most of my readers just saw a cliche and suggested I remove it.

I hemmed and hawed. I impugned (in my own mind) my readers' intelligence for not seeing the beauty of it as a foreshadowing device. I waved my artistic license.

And then I took it out. In my contest entry, the sentence reads:

By the time Patrick arrived at the tavern after church, he knew his former anonymity was a thing of the past.

Okay, good, it doesn't use a cliche. Or does it? What about "thing of the past"? Shit! I tried "he knew he was in trouble" before that, but decided that was a cliche, too.

Which brings me to the crux of the problem: it's nearly impossible to write without occasionally dropping a cliche or hackneyed phrase into your narrative. In fact, I'd wager a guess that it is impossible. That you'll never find a book, anywhere, by anyone, that doesn't include a single cliched phrase.

Go on, I dare you. I'll be here when you get back in about 40 years.

I'm told, however, that the editors whom you want to impress to publish your novel when you enter a contest or send in a partial/full hate cliches. That cliches will turn your manuscript into a wallbanger faster than you can say "you'll never be published in this town". Which is why I took it out of my contest entry. I didn't want to get pitched against the wall in a fit of pique.

But I'm hard-pressed to understand how this actually works in real life. Given that I just said I don't believe there's a single book in the English language that doesn't have a cliche in it, how do writers get their cliches past these editors in the first place?

Of course, I'm not about to provide an answer to my rhetorical question. I have no idea how they do it. I imagine it has something to do with the overall ratio of cliche:not cliche, as well as the distinctiveness of the writer's voice and story. But it might also just have a little to do with luck and how much the cliches you do use jump off the page and announce themselves.

Which brings me full circle on my contest entry. Because I realized after I'd sent it that it also includes this sentence, toward the end of Chapter One:

If he’d had the first inkling that Lady Rosalind fell into that category, he would have avoided her like the plague.

Ouch! And yet, no one commented on that cliche. Nobody. Which I find utterly fascinating and completely inexplicable.

So, anyway, as of this morning, the cat went back in the bag. Yep, it's a cliche, but I firmly believe it works in the story. And if that one cliche (or the plague above) is the only thing that prevents my manuscript from being published...well, that would be a dream, wouldn't it?