Re: The Effect of Cliches on a Story: A Writer's Inquiry
I'm not sure silvermoon. One reason I wrote my above article on "formulae" rather han specifically clichés or tropes is it is far easier to define a formula, ie something that is to create an expected result, than a cliché.
For example, one trilogy my lady and I read very recently was Robin Hobb's fitz fool series. One of the major plots in that series is that the main character's daughter is kidnapped. This on it's surface seems like the most cliché of clichés. Helpless little girl, big manly father and rescue bate.
yet I have rarely seen a plot so intensively portrayed. Bee, the kidnapped child had a huge part to play, almost half of the book was her story. She had huge interactions with her captors which ranged from helplessness to victimisation, to trying to escape, to understand what actually she had been kidnapped for, and finally not just growing up, but taking a massive amount of agency and actually exacting a pretty extreme revenge on the people who kidnapped her and having to change because of it, (really she could give Aria stark a series run for her money in the hard as nails nine year old girl steaks).
mean while, her father didn't just swoop in and do a rescue but had his own evolution to go through, meeting other characters, going through journeys and enacting changes to himself and the world.
This was a case where Hobb did use a formula, but certainly I would never have accused of being clichéd.
On the other hand,Peers Brown, one of the worst writers I've come across recently did! make an effort to have the women in his books be super tough, ---- right until said woman suddenly became helpless in time for the big manly hero to save her.
this certainly was! a cliche, and what is more, a cliche which went directly against the portrayal of the characters in the previous section of the book (for the full story, see my reviews of Peers brown's trilogy which were pretty dire imho).
Hope some of this makes sense.
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