Cliches for Aspiring Writers (Rafael Yglesias)
A terrific column from author Rafael Yglesias which ties in nicely with the preceding post. An excerpt:
“Always try the cliché first,” Roman Polanski said to me when I confessed I didn’t know how to approach a particular scene. “It usually works. That’s why it’s a cliché.”
As is true of most aphorisms, especially the wittier ones, his advice is helpful in almost all situations, but when wrong it’s disastrous. That’s why Polanski included the clever exception, “It usually works.”
Sadly, for those who are busy sawing off their feet to escape the trap of clichés, every story is chock full of them and sometimes depends on an especially hoary one. The solution, to borrow another aphorism, is to aim without aiming. What really makes a work original is you. It is the writer’s particular experience and sensibility that infuses a cliché with the oxygen rich blood of its original life.
The same caveat applies to the famous advice given to all neophyte writers, “Write what you know.” The implication is autobiography in some form: memoir, fiction in which you are the main character, stories about your family, your background, someone you know well. But the advice is too banal to be useful to a young writer without an obviously compelling story to tell.
What if you are unlucky enough not to have endured the Holocaust, witnessed Apartheid, or been sexually abused by your father? What if you feel that the world you know, although thoroughly unpleasant, is also very dull? Or has been written about so well by another that you have nothing to add?
It’s hard to conceive of someone who could work for at least a few hours each day for months and years on the same story without it being close enough to their life experience to fuel their commitment. When a writer chooses characters that seem far away from what he or she has direct experience of — say Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, about the elderly residents of the Diamond Home for the Aged written when he was twenty-six — it’s rarely their first writing. Updike had been publishing in The New Yorker for years and before that in the Harvard Lampoon. Besides, the setting of Poorhouse, its social milieu, the old folks themselves, were people and a place Updike did know well.
And who knows the world of The Hobbit better than Tolkien? One can argue that fantasy and science fiction novelists write more out of what they know than any autobiographical writer. They are the creators of everything in their work and can’t be disputed as inaccurate by a reader, except when they internally contradict themselves, whereas readers of realistic fiction may compare their world to the book’s and quibble about whether authors really do know what they claim to.
“Write what you know.”
But what do you know? Is it compelling? I don’t mean to your readers. To you. You will keep company with your writing longer than anyone else. (Unless you’re Tolstoy and your wife copies all your manuscripts by hand seven times over.)
If your subject doesn’t involve emotions, ideas, truths and lies that delight, frighten, soothe and enrage you, how can you expect it to fascinate a stranger? Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.
Other cliches he notes:
“Know your audience.”
“Write what you want to read.”
He concludes:
Over time, if you work hard and write what obsesses you, there will be readers who will want to live in your peculiar universe, and precisely because what you have provided is rare they will be all the more grateful for your creation.
For more, go here.