From Cliché to Fresh Expression

From Cliché to Fresh Expression

With Frederick Meyer

Opening the Question — 0:00:02

Tonight’s topic: cliché. It’s come up at the edges of several recent sessions, and it seemed worth looking at directly—getting a clear personal definition of what it is, why it matters as a craft concern, and what to actually do about it.

Rather than arriving with a fixed answer, participants were invited to start by sharing their own sense of cliché in writing and what effect it has.

Several threads emerged. Clichés are what’s expected, overused, easy to grab—they foreclose surprise and make writing feel predictable. They’re catchphrases from everyday language: when you encounter one in a poem, you sense something borrowed rather than made. One participant offered a different angle: clichés carry the “weight of the already read”—they have a punch that everyone relates to, a kind of cultural storage. Another noted that cliché in a poem is like biting a walnut in a chocolate chip cookie: a sudden change of texture, a jolt out of the smoothness you’d been in.

The ski metaphor came up: fresh powder versus tracks. When language is genuinely alive, it’s like skiing unbroken powder—every moment a new decision, no predetermined path. When you slide into a cliché, you’ve hit a groove someone else laid down. You speed up, decisions are made for you, it’s easy—but you’re no longer making your own way.

What Clichés Actually Are — 0:04:00

Things become clichés because they’re right in the strike zone of some experience. They’re usually accurate—often elegantly so. It’s all in a day’s work. He’s got a green thumb. Back to square one. These are precise, vivid, and economical. They became clichés because they were good enough that everyone started using them.

The point isn’t that the thought is wrong or the observation is inaccurate. It’s that the phrase is in the collective unconscious—already laid down, already tracked. You can make a Wheel of Fortune clue out of it because people can fill in the blanks from just the vowels.

The last line of Joyce’s “The Dead”—upon all the living and the dead—is the kind of phrase that should have been nominated to become a cliché. It was so powerful and compact that you wouldn’t have been surprised. The difference is it never quite did. That’s luck and timing as much as craft.

There’s genuine complexity here: life itself is often clichéd. Encountering phrases from pop psychology—the repressed self, pushing things down and making them worse—and finding they describe your own experience exactly is a real and moving thing. The words become new when you arrive at them yourself through genuine experience, even if they’ve been jargon for decades. Clichés are clichés because they perfectly describe what is actually happening, and for the writer who encounters them fresh, they can land like revelation. The problem is that for the reader, who hasn’t had that experience, those same words bounce off. The tracks are too worn.

The distinction between cliché and trope is worth making briefly: trope operates at the level of story and character—the damsel in distress, the curmudgeon who turns good, the hero saving the cat. Cliché as it matters here operates at the level of language, the sentence, the phrase. Tropes aren’t necessarily bad (save the cat is actually good screenwriting advice), and neither are clichés when used deliberately. But a phrase used without awareness—sliding into the track because it’s easy—tends to break the immersion a reader was in.

The Collaborative Exercise — 0:20:18

Writing the clichéd version — 0:20:18

The evening’s practical work: the group built a short story together, first piling in as many clichés as possible, then working sentence by sentence to find fresher language.

The story that emerged: on a dark and stormy night, someone knocks at the door of a mansion. A dog howls at the moon. There is an eerie silence. The bay window shatters into a million pieces. Maxine woke with a start—bolted upright—her heart hammering in her chest, caught in her throat. Who’s there? she cried as she shook like a leaf. She tiptoed down the stairs, each step longer than the last, into the silvery moonlight. There was Patrick—her butler—drunk as a skunk, weaving uncertainly. He keeled over like a mighty oak. My morning Joe, please, madam, he slurred. Then he keeled over like a mighty oak. The wind howled through the broken pane.

By the end, the group had assembled a tight little comedy of clichés—and found they could do it in about ten minutes, because the language was all right there, handed to you.

How did reading it feel? One participant wanted to know what happened next, engaged despite herself. Others noted it felt very clichéd, but acknowledged the pleasure in the familiarity. The cliché version isn’t nothing: it’s a Reader’s Digest 1950s-style story, warm and immediately readable. Genre fiction survives partly on this. But it doesn’t surprise; it doesn’t see.

Rewriting toward fresh language — 0:32:44

The second phase: take the same story, sentence by sentence, and ask—how do we say this so it hasn’t been said before?

The method is to sit with the actual sensory experience and find language that’s never quite been used for it. This means asking: what does this thing actually do, what does it sound or feel like, what would a person in the room notice? Not what’s the most efficient description, but what’s the most specific true one.

“There was a wrap at the door” — a perfect phrase, which is why it’s a cliché. It sounds exactly like a not-too-heavy knock. So what to replace it with? Think about the specific scenario: it’s a mansion with a brass door knocker (which itself is a good detail). The sound of brass on a heavy oak door would be something heavier, more resonant. The clunk of the brass knocker penetrated the foyer. Clunk is onomatopoetic and specific. Penetrated has an invasive quality that suits the scene. The foyer echoes because it’s large and probably empty. None of this has been written before, and every word is doing something.

The dog — the dog howled at the moon is extremely tracked. What does a dog actually do when it’s startled from sleep? It comes up on all four legs, ears up, immediately barking—no lag between sleep and alarm. The wolfhound woke barking and leapt at the door. Not a generic dog: a wolfhound, which is both large and specific. Woke barking compresses the immediacy—asleep one second, fully a dog the next. Leapt rather than barked madly puts the action in the verb rather than the adverb. No adverbs needed.

The two sentences together: The clunk of the brass knocker penetrated the foyer. The wolfhound woke barking and leapt at the door. Short. Rhythmically clipped. Setting a scene of something wrong, something imminent. Karen’s observation: they’ll want a longer sentence next, for rhythm. Two staccato sentences need something to breathe.

The confluence of sounds — brass on the door, claws on wood, barking in an otherwise quiet space. Rather than narrating this with a clichéd phrase like all hell broke loose (which is maximally telly—a letter that says “bad things happened”), the group built a sentence that captures the actual sonic texture: Brass on brass, claws on wood, and their ceaseless barking mingled, echoing through the calm of the mansion. Parallel construction; the sounds themselves become the subject; mingled and echoing do the showing without editorializing. The mansion’s calm is named so the disruption of it has something to disrupt.

This is show-don’t-tell done not as a rule but as a consequence: you get more from the sentence, and it takes about as long to read as the scene takes to happen. The wolfhound takes two seconds to wake and leap; the sentence takes two seconds to read.

Key Observations from the Revision Work — 0:40:30

A few things became clear through the process:

Description courts cliché. Any time you’re describing something, you’re close to the grooves—they’re where description has settled over time. The more you’re in purely descriptive mode, the more vigilance is useful. This doesn’t mean vigilance while drafting: write the clichés down, get the story on the page, let the placeholder phrases do their work. Clichés are excellent placeholder language. The revision phase is when to go back through and find the moments where you slid into a track and ask whether you want to go there or push off somewhere that’s genuinely yours.

The adverb impulse and the cliché impulse come from the same place. When you write barked madly, the madly is there because the verb alone doesn’t seem like enough. When you write heart hammering in her chest, the image is fully traced and familiar. Both patterns come from reaching for the nearest available thing rather than dwelling with the experience long enough to find something newer. Getting into the actual experience—what does a startled dog do, what does a brass knocker on an oak door sound like—tends to produce language that needs less modification because it’s already doing more.

Some clichés can stay. The aim isn’t a cliché-free text. It’s language that’s alive enough to carry the reader in. There’s nothing wrong with dark and stormy night if it’s doing intentional work (it’s so clichéd it’s become funny again). The question is whether each phrase was chosen or just reached for.

On all hell broke loose: this phrase got raised as a possible candidate for the chaos scene, and it’s worth a moment. The problem isn’t just that it’s a cliché; it’s that it’s deeply telly. It tells you that bad things happened without telling you what they were. You leave with the knowledge but not the experience. The goal is always to give the reader the experience, which means showing the specific noises, the specific actions, the specific chaos—not summarizing it.

Making It Strange — 1:22:33

There’s a concept applied to Tolstoy’s prose called Making It Strange: the process of reexamining familiar experiences and rendering them in new ways. It’s also a Buddhist idea—beginner’s mind. In the middle of a meditation retreat, eating an orange becomes completely new. You’ve never done this before. The waxy bumps of the skin, the symmetrical crescents inside, the particular way it pulls apart—incredible richness in what you’d normally consume without noticing.

Writing that makes things strange gives readers that experience: the familiar made new. You don’t need to have ridden a jet pack through Jupiter. You need to eat an orange in a way that gives the experience to someone who has eaten a thousand oranges without ever quite being there. That’s one of the real gifts writing can offer. And it’s also the antidote to cliché—not wit, not effort, but attention: inhabiting the experience you’re trying to render closely enough that the language comes from the inside of it rather than from the shelf.

What a participant said in closing captures the spirit of the exercise: she was going to apply it to her own writing—not as vigilance while drafting, but as a way of going back through and asking, where did I reach for the shelf? and what do I actually see when I look at this more closely? That’s the practice.