I've been writing seriously for a couple of years now and in that time I've begun to notice something, especially if you spend much time reading short stories. They tell you to stay away from tired old cliches, but the stories don't do that. Instead, it seems that right now, in this decade, it's been long enough since these specific cliches were used that they are now the fresh new trend.

Currently, twist endings are in...more linear adventure tales are out. Surreal stories are in, straight-forward stories are out. New tech stories are in. Alien stories are out.

That said, I've no idea what's In or what's Out regarding short stories or literature in general. It would vary according to the country, perhaps, although I seriously doubt that anyone takes this kind of thing seriously other than the journalists who've managed to sell their idea to the editor.

Fiction's been In and Out according to reports over recent years. At least this kind of nonsense sparks debates. Meanwhile, a book detailing the history of fresh air will be a top seller, as will the latest from one of the mainstream novelists (I aim to be the last person on earth to read Dan Brown or JK Rowling).

Pirate stories! Books, movies...they be e'erywhere these days, by thunder!

Twas th' singular fault o' a national holiday, so it were:

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

As an example, in one story a young Native American girl goes on a spirit journey to find the great Eagle-Worm (a dragon). The Eagle-Worm shows her a vision of the future, where all of the trees have been replaced with skyscrapers, etc. But that was it; there was no real point or resolution to the story. The girl saw the future and was horrified, and then the story ended. I can only guess that showing the current world from the point of view of someone from the past was a novel enough idea that the story didn't need a real plot. But of course it didn't age well.

So, my conclusion is that whether our ideas are cliched or novel, our main focus should be on writing a good story with interesting characters. Then it won't matter what the current (or future!) trend is.

However, I write what I want to write. I really enjoy Howard, and his Conan stories, as they are great escapist fiction. They are horribly "cliche" with doe eyed maidens, huge snakes, hacking and slashing and looting. But, THEY ARE FUN! I like to read them.

I try to write the same way. I love writing about rebellions, revolutions, struggle, etc, so that is what I write.

Just my two cents .

It seems natural for the stranger's character. I couldn't imagine him saying anything else. It just bubbled forth. But then I realized that Gandalf had said this in the FOTR movie. And the stanger is an immortal with superhuman abilities, like Gandalf.

I believe this is an example of pulling the first thing off the shelf, which my subconcious had stocked with LOTR.

Besides, cliches are permissible in dialogue (preferably not in excess unless it's a character trait, of course) since people do talk in cliches. If we continue down this path, then we'd better throw out every single word in our first drafts. 'Course, who's to say our second drafts won't be normal cliche minefields?

This is the small stuff, though. In the long run, it may give your story a familiar flavor, it may crimp your own style, but unless you can't write a sentence that someone else hasn't already written then I wouldn't think too much of it.

I was picturing far more general trends when I started this topic. Cliches that are out of style vs. cliches that are in style. This is my cynnical way of looking at it as I don't think there's been a truly fresh idea presented in quite some time.

For instance, "Just tea, thank you" and "Wait, I can explain" aren't just things immortals say in response to the offer of a carb or husbands say when they're caught with another woman. Everyone says those things all the time. On the other hand, I recently pointed out "Come with me if you want to live." Why? Because for the life of me I can't think of a time I've heard it except from the Terminator movies (or in deliberate reference to them). It's not the sort of thing people say all the time.

Sometimes a simple paucity of literary experience on the part of the audience can lead them to dismiss an idea as derivative when it is actually archtypical (or at least common coin). This is what is usually happening when people dismiss all Ghost stories as being copied from The Sixth Sense or all time travel stories as being like The Butterfly Effect (interesting note, the original "Butterfly Effect" time travel story...this takes too long to explain, but they featured a nice parody of it on The Simpsons one time).

I've been happy to see the dumbing trend in mainstream literature which existed from the 1930's to 80's may be finally reversing itself. It is good to see drooling idiots like Joyce, Miller and Hemingway being ignored, largely through the concerted efforts of generations of F and SF writers.

In 1975 I walked out of a world literature class; the teacher said that SF wasn't literature and was not worth reading. I thought of staying and asking him to read "The Stars My Destination" or "The Weapon Shops of Isher" but I realized he was lost and could teach nothing.

The first time I read "Ender's Game" I realized that Sci Fi had finally reached the point where our cliches had become the structural steel of a new literature which would greatly surpass the old.

I would say to keep writing what you like to write! If enough writers do this it will force the world in the direction it needs to go.

Horror fiction, sadly, went boom and bust between the 70s and 90s, mainly due to the fact that as the supernatural element got played out and its practitioners moved toward psychological rationales for what was going on, folks like James Herbert, Robert McCammon, Koontz and Straub realized that what they were actually writing was suspense thrillers. Soon their publishers began to package their new books to reflect this.

Unlike the SF and F short story (which is still very much fresh and vital) the horror short has been buried under an avalanche of miserablist dross calling itself Slipstream fiction. This seems to show no signs of changing. Indeed, UK writers appeared to love wallowing in this new movement of waffle.

The best we can do, Christine, it to hone whatever it is that's (hopefully) unique about our writer's voice. Next we tell a story as best we can, and if the story isn't exactly brand-spanking-new never-before-been-done then at the very least we have to try and make our 'voice' as interesting as we can. That might be enough to capture an editor's interest. Maybe what we're looking at isn't original... but perhaps how we look at it is: take something old and look at it like its new. I guess that's where the notion of the best writers still having the eyes of a child comes from. Sure, everything's probably been done, but then that's been true for a long time. So it's not what you say, but how you say it...

... there again, that too is a cliche!

As for cliched dialog... well, let's face it, we all use stock phrases in real life wihtout much realizing it. "Wait! I can explain!" is a classic! Guys ain't often afflicted with brilliantly blinding contributions to conversation (just ask any young woman in a bar or club who's ever been hit on!) Mainly, though, I guy will throw a line like that out in order to give him time to think of something else. At which point he might say -

If more writers demonstrated the imagination of Joyce, courage of Miller or style of Hemingway the literary world would be a better place.

I think that American fiction would still be trapped in this direction were it not for the brilliant independence of Sci Fi writers' styles in the early years. But Sci Fi's direction away from them is not a hard and fast rule. You can most easily see the Joyce and Miller influence in Vonnegut, thought his stories are more tightly written and less digressive. You can see some Hemingway in Bradbury though Bradbury shows so much more flexibility and less stereotypy.

Does this make internally consistant sense even if you disagree?

Those authors represent liberation rather than entrapment and I should think that a few American sci-fi writers just might have been inspired, directly or indirectly, by some of them. For better or worse, I've a feeling they've influenced global fiction in general.

Excuse my ignorance but I've no real idea of the extent to which 'brilliant' independent Sci-Fi authors of an earlier age have shaped the direction of fiction this century. Perhaps you could explain that point a little more?

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I've been happy to see the dumbing trend in mainstream literature which existed from the 1930's to 80's may be finally reversing itself. It is good to see drooling idiots like Joyce, Miller and Hemingway being ignored, largely through the concerted efforts of generations of F and SF writers.

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I started peeing when I read that statement and haven't stopped.

I might repeat what a friend said to me when I was making derogatory comments about Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series.... "Hmmm... He's been published, is highly successful, and has made tons of money with his writing. And you have not...."

More to the point, whatever the creative genius of those writers, the endless attempt to imitate their originality really does represent a tremendous and concerted act of stupidity on the part of tens of thousands of writers whose native talents were utterly wasted if not obliterated by the "literary" establishment.

As it happens, I'm a fan of Hemmingway's writing and even more so of his style. I think that Joyce is really an aquired taste no matter how you look at it, but I can see that it's not just incoherence, and I like a lot of his work. Depending on which Miller we're talking about, I think that he was a very talented writer who obviously worked for Satan...or perhaps Santa

For myself, I think that the problem isn't the writers of the past but the efforts of non-writers to destroy anything that isn't derivative of those writers. It's just as bad as the non-writers who try to destroy any attempt to write anything that is an actual attempt at communication. In the end they come down to being the same thing.

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...endless attempt to imitate their originality really does represent a tremendous and concerted act of stupidity on the part of tens of thousands of writers whose native talents were utterly wasted...

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Survivor, 'Miller' was Henry Miller who wrote Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, et cetera. I don't think argument is worthwhile, but I would challenge any of the incontinent ones to don a pair of Depends undergarments and try readng any three books of either Miller or Joyce (six of Hemingway as his prose style is so easy) within the space of a week then try to write a comprehensible short story. It takes a month or so for the brain to clear after reading too much of them. I would lay odds that Tolkein never read any of the three.

BTW, Does anyone here remember the fad of typing all in small letters without punctuation?

Like I said, if I really wanted to argue the point, it could only end with me being dragged out of here in handcuffs.

Naming 3 of maybe 11 literary geniuses, true geniuses, of the last century, and calling them drooling idiots.....

*shudder*

No, no. I'm not going to rebut, I'm not going to rebut, I'm not going to rebut, I'm not going to rebut, I'm not going to rebut.

Little ol' me certainly doesn't need to 'defend' the authors mentioned in this debate. In fact, doing so seems absurd!

I certainly don't agree with the notion that being 'unsuccessful' means one's opinion is automatically invalid.

Genius is obviously in the eye of the beholder, so if anyone regards Tolkein as either a greater writer or a more influential one than say, Hemmingway or Joyce - good luck to them!

When I put on my reader hat I want, first and foremost, to be entertained. If the story is good and engrossing, the last thing I'm going to worry about is whether or not it is utterly unique within the body of historic literature. I appreciate thought-provoking stories, so long as they have sufficient entertainment value, but the entertainment aspect has to come first. For simple mental gymnastics, I'll pick up a Hawkins book, or a good text on chaos theory.

Maybe I'm having a hard time following what people are assuming constitutes a cliche. Is a story about a character that struggles, suffers, grows, and overcomes obstacles cliche? Its been done a thousand times before. If it is simply a character using a mode of expression commonplace for her time and place, I'd say not. If the stories plot line is regularly replicated in Saturday morning cartoon series, then maybe.

But I think that naming three well known writers whom I've read at length and who each have a major body of stylistic imitation which happens to bear little resemblence to most of the stylism I've seen produced by members of this forum is a valid tool to aid our introspection. We have much less difficulty recognizing cliche if the writing style is foreign to our own.Remember this is a discussion of style and cliche rather than substance.

I think that Joyce in particular says some very profound things, but his form of writing is so (pardon-remember that I study human bahavior for a living please-no defamation intended) psychotic-like (using predicate associations, overabstraction, digression, projection, reversed chronology and a host of parallel threads) that popularizing it had the unintentional consequences of legitimizing very chaotic stylism.

Going back to the original thread discussion with apologies to Christine, I think that over time the sort of tightly written and well ordered prose she writes will return to 'mainstream' popularity, but possibly not until people are tired of sorting through the sort of chaos which has been taught as literature for the past 40 years.

[This message has been edited in the hope of reducing unintended offense to its readers by keldon02 (edited September 25, 2005).]

As for the popularizing of Joyce and his style - when did that happen? As I'm sure you know his work has always been more popular with critics than readers (for obvious reasons).

Cliche is a potentially ambiguous term, especially if one considers the attitude of those who worship the avant-garde which, in all artforms, renders most other work terribly 'cliched'. This is a nonsensical approach of course and denies the brilliance of classicism in painting, music and literature.

Still, sometimes culture needs a kick up the arse in the form of a urinal as art or Joycean linguistics. As for music, I'd rather listen to Cage's '4.33' than most of what passes for modern pop.

I think it was Cavalli-Sforza who said that there are no primitive human languages and that English and Spanish have been streamlined for common use, beyond the complexity of more insular languages. So would it would be natural to lose sense in translation?

I'm not an Irish language reader, but I believe it fair to say that Irish has a good deal of nuance which probably cannot be translated to English. It is also probable that reading Irish-English idiom written by a member of that culture loses sense in translation to standard US English. One sees the same effect when writers try to translate US Southern idiom or 'Ebonics' to mainstream English. Readers concentrate on the superficialities of what Webster considers mispronunceations and what standard speakers consider scrambled sentences. So they lose the sense of the story, just as with Joyce.

Music? Try Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall".

I did think that you had a valid point to make, though you went about it from the wrong end (and resorted to the wrong methods, namely causing people to piss themselves and then calling them names for it ). I think that we can all cite examples that clarify things. Tolkien, for instance. Or Gibson. Even Asimov has inspired both unimaginative imitators and cultish denounciations of everything that wasn't derivative of his work.