Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff shares his advice regarding cliché.
I don’t blame people for slipping into the cliché—I find myself fighting it often enough in my own writing. In the TV series, Dead Like Me, George’s English professor father gives a lecture on Shakespeare’s sonnets and notes that a line about his heart and a tree feels cliché. But he goes on to suggest that clichés are the things that stick, the ideas or phrases that capture a phenomenon so well for so many of us that we can’t say it better ourselves.
There’s something to that. Cliché is the idiom of the exceptional, a street jargon of mots justs for everyday use. But we know that in writing we’re not supposed to be using language in its everyday application (trust me, this goes whether you write realistic fiction or poetry). That’s because they’re so available, so common, that to use them looks like a cop-out, a failure to put something into your own words. The word cliché comes from the French, “to click,” and refers to “the striking of melted lead in order to obtain a proof or cast” (OED); it’s related to stereotype, which was a metal plate used for printing. It’s what “clicks,” but what clicks over and over again.
The trick with avoiding cliché, I think, is to recognize one when you see it. This means attending to your language and to your ideas and sentiments. When you notice one, ask, “Is this meaningful here?” Some clichés are probably admissible in those places where they continue to signify, but what makes them cliché is that they’ve ceased to glow for us, and we tend to just gloss over them as we read. You want every word to mean something.
But don’t overdo it. Word usage can be cliché, too. Adjectives, for instance, are overused because people think they are intrinsically poetic and a way to avoid cliché. They’re not either. In fact, next time you want to use a lot of adjectives, think of Lunch-lady Doris making horse-meat chili: “More testicles mean more iron!” (That ought to put a funny taste in your mouth.) More adjectives do not mean more iron.
Tend to your nouns, first, like exercising your “core” muscles or adjusting the macro focus on your camera (notice my metaphors don’t work for an automatic age). Bring in modifiers to tweak and add a meaningful zest to your words. You adject wisely when you judiciously adject.
Be aware that when you try to describe some event, emotion, person, idea, etc., the first thing that comes to mind will probably be something cliché, so be wary and try to come up with something else. Once you’ve done that, ask whether you haven’t just come up with something meaningless, forced, pedantic, or cutesy. By cutesy I mean the kind of writing that tries to play on words or ideas and to be self-consciously ironic about it at the same time. This is actually hard to do, and most people end up sounding like they’re trying to initiate the reader into some special club that “gets it,” only the reader thinks it so obvious that there’s no one who doesn’t get it, and so the author just looks foolish. You don’t want to look foolish.
One last thought—a dangerous thought, perhaps, but I stand by it. Bible verses and hymns can be cliché, too. Just because you quoted a psalm doesn’t mean you’ve shared a spiritual experience with your reader. Many poets can reference or quote Scripture powerfully, but it becomes cliché when you rely on it to do the work you are supposed to do as the writer—which is the main point about clichés, after all: they don’t work if you’re not working, and you have to work hard to make them work.
Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff shares his advice regarding cliché. 
