Everyone knows you’re not supposed to include clichés in writing. Unfortunately, a lot of people do. This is how certain scenes, lines of dialogue, and techniques become clichés in the first place. The following is a public service announcement, telling you what’s already been done so you can do something more original.

Don’t be ashamed if you recognize some of these in your writing — I’ve written a few myself.

But also don’t say, “Well, mine will be different. Mine is necessary.” It’s probably not. Think of something new and creative.

1. Starting with an alarm clock.
There are all sorts of ways to start a chapter or a story. Don’t choose this one. In fact, unless something extremely interesting happens to your protagonist the second he wakes up, you’re probably starting too early anyway. Begin in the middle of the action.
If the alarm clock blows up, is actually an alien robot in disguise, or isn’t there because the protagonist wakes up in a room he’s never seen before, then you can start with an alarm clock. But only then.

2. Having a character pass a mirror so you can describe what he/she looks like.
The “mirror technique” can be extended to include any description that sounds awkward to readers, from, “she combed her fingers through her light brown, slightly wavy hair,” to “he stared at her with his piercing blue-green eyes.” These kinds of descriptions sound like the author is frantically trying to tell the reader something. Real description should blend in, and probably won’t come all at once the first time we meet a character.
Some safe ways of doing physical description that feel more natural: comparing the character to a family member and describing similarities or differences, showing the character thinking about what he doesn’t like about his appearance, mentioning only a few unusual features that characterize that person, having someone make fun of or compliment the character’s appearance, and anything else that involves some other relevant action or dialogue.

3. Describing a routine
If the routine is something the readers will be familiar with, then don’t include it. We know how most people brush their teeth. And make tea. And start the car.
I’d rather hear about how someone in the hallway told a joke, making the teenager choke and swallow a gulp of Listerine. Or about the way the five-year-old tries to pour a plastic pot of Kool-Aid in the proper manner. Or how, the second the car started, a muffled, entirely-too-cheery voice from the backseat said, “Looks like you’ve got engine troubles.”
Describe that, and I’ll be interested.

4. Ending a person-goes-unconscious scene with, “and then…blackness.”
Or anything equivalent to that. There aren’t a lot of really original ways for someone to go to sleep or get knocked out, so it’ll take work to come up with something new.
But do the work. Try writing a knockout scene that could only be written for your particular character. It might combine aspects of her personality and the way she would react, or include one last thought that characterizes her.

5. Having a Christian character know and quote an appropriate Bible verse.
This only feels natural in very limited circumstances. If you introduce a pastor’s wife character whose sole purpose is interjecting words of wisdom at various times, I’m not buying it as a reader, even though it’s perfectly plausible that she would say things like that. But if you describe a woman with early-stage-Alzheimer’s who mutters her childhood memory verses to herself, terrified that she’ll lose her grip on something very important to her, I am there. It works, suddenly, because it’s not a cliché anymore.

6. Ending a chapter with someone shouting “Oh no!”
Add in here any equally intentional cliffhanger. If the reader can tell you’re trying to cleverly keep information from them, it’ll probably just be annoying. Each chapter should have a tiny bit of resolution to it at least, and shouldn’t feel like you just got tired of writing the chapter and cut it off after a really dramatic line.

7. Making the villain describe the plan to an underling.
Don’t ever have the bad guy talk just because you need to give the readers critical details they need for the plot. These kind of info-dump speeches tend to be more common on the villain side of things, but the same applies to protagonists. If you do a good enough job of placing hints and describing what actually happens in the action scene itself, you shouldn’t need a long speech ahead of time explaining the nefarious scheme and the intended negative consequences.

Note: There are ways to do pretty much all of these things in creative, non-cliché ways. The fact that they are clichés can even be to your advantage if you want to make things funny. Also, make sure you check out my other blog on about essay writing: https://familyessay.org/500-word-essay/.

The only part of Shrek that I remember is Princess Fiona singing sweetly to the bird…then hitting a high note that makes the poor thing keel over. If you’re going to use a cliché, give it a surprise twist we didn’t see coming.

Most articles on ways to improve writing will give a very simple rule: cut adjectives and adverbs. Instead, use strong nouns and verbs.

And they’re right. Adjectives are like sprinkles. Used in the right way, they can add just the right dash of color, but they really don’t have much substance and can easily be overdone. (Or maybe I’m just biased against sprinkles because I threw up a bunch of them when I got food poisoning a few years ago…long story.)

The time when the no-adjective rule is most likely to apply is when it comes to characters. There are so many more ways to show what people are like that we shouldn’t need to slap on one-word descriptions. Unlike, say, a rock, which can’t do much to demonstrate that it’s rough or igneous or whatever, a person’s words and actions can substitute for adjectives.

Don’t tell us he’s quirky. Show him playing “Little Mermaid” songs an accordion just because it sounded like fun. Don’t tell us she’s a bad loser. Have her slam her cards down on the Candy Land board and accuse her seven-year-old cousin of cheating. Suddenly, adjectives aren’t necessary.

That’s all well and good…but what happens to those poor adjectives, I ask you? Is there no place for them to go, other than Words with Friends or bad fan fiction? Will no one welcome the syntactical rejects of the world?

Thankfully, I’m a big fan of underdogs and misfits of all kinds, being a bit of one myself. All of my poor, unwanted adjectives limp off to an Excel spreadsheet. I make one for every book-length project that I start. It contains all of my characters’ names, and next to that, three adjectives that would best describe these people.

My favorite spreadsheet right now is full of characters from the first two books in a YA science fiction series I’m working on. There are twenty-three characters listed so far. That would be 69 different adjectives. And I tried to make each one the perfect word to describe that particular person.

In that same file, I put other character information that might come in handy. For some reason, I don’t picture any of my characters in my head, so I have to write down their physical description, or I’ll change it about five times over the course of the book. I also have their age and Myers-Briggs type.

(Incidentally, if you told me what your type was when I did a series on personality types, I instantly compared it to the characters I have on record so far. You should be friends with my fictional characters. You’d get along well.)

I almost always write at least five or six chapters before I start pulling all of this together, and I usually don’t do the three adjectives until I’m almost done with the entire project. The reason? Adjectives are powerful little words. Those three adjectives doing their best to sum up an entire person. If you’ve ever tried to think about the complexity of human beings, their personalities and intellects and the ways they interact with others, and tried to compress all of that into three words, you understand that you need to know the person pretty well first.

Don’t believe me? Try it for the person you know the best: yourself. It might actually be harder because of the crazy amount of information you know about yourself, but it can be a good exercise. You might even try asking other people to describe you in three words (but give them plenty of time—it can be difficult).

One the main benefits I see in having a file like this is that it made my characters seem more like real people to me. When I went through the process of thinking about how I would describe them, it gave me a better picture of who they were. In a few cases, I noticed some inconsistencies in their actions that I needed to fix in my next edit.

Can you grid up real people into an Excel document? Can you describe someone completely and accurately in just three adjectives? Nope. Not possible.

But is it a helpful tool in writing a novel? You bet.