It was a dark and stormy night. Mary Sue was looking at her ridiculously beautiful face in the mirror. “I’m so ugly,” she thought to herself, “No one will ever be interested in me.” Outside, the local quarterback and the president of the Shakespearean club were fighting for the right to take her to the prom. Nobody knew it, but the quarterback was secretly a vampire, and the literature club president was the estranged heir to the largest corporation in the nation.
Did you notice how many cliches I just crammed into that little paragraph? You have seen all of these elements and many others time and time again. Writers everywhere, doesn’t matter which genre they write in, keep using them to the point where the reader can sleepwalk through the story and still know what will happen next.
Not to offend anyone, but some writers just can’t do any better, while others genuinely think that using as many recognizable tropes as possible will draw a bigger audience because readers only respond well to something they are already familiar with. And that is a huge cliche in itself.
The only thing literary tropes really do is drag your reader out of the story. And if your entire plot is one big trope, chances are many people will opt to avoid it altogether.
For this article, we collected some of the worst storytelling tropes readers find most annoying. How many of these would you like to see disappear forever? Would you like to add anything to this list of cliches writers should stop using? Let us know in the comments, and definitely share this article with any writer you know.
#1
"Describing women of color like they're a dessert menu. 'She had skin of a dark chocolate cinnamon mocha cocoa coffee cake African princess.'"
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46points
#3
geminiloveca said:
"Characters describing themselves while looking in the mirror."
"Characters describing themselves while looking in the mirror."
HelloIsFloob replied:
"She looked tenderly into the mirror with her technicolor eyes, her perfect, flowing hair shining beautifully. Her dress, her makeup, her every conceivable aspect was absolutely, divinely perfect. Mary Sue sighed. Why was she born flawless? Why couldn't she just be a normal human being like everyone else? She shrugged it off and took her pet dragon to magic school."
"She looked tenderly into the mirror with her technicolor eyes, her perfect, flowing hair shining beautifully. Her dress, her makeup, her every conceivable aspect was absolutely, divinely perfect. Mary Sue sighed. Why was she born flawless? Why couldn't she just be a normal human being like everyone else? She shrugged it off and took her pet dragon to magic school."
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42points
#4
"Two guys fighting for one girl who is surprised that anybody at all likes her. Usually a high school student, the guys (one or both) generally have some sort of supernatural aspect, small town, girl doesn’t have more than one good friend, I could go on."
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38points
#5
"Adding romance that doesn't further the plot. Unnecessary romances or relationships always come off as being predictable or forced."
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35points
#6
"This is one of my favorites: a contest to see who can write the most atrocious opening sentence. The 2018 winner:
'Cassie smiled as she clenched John’s hand on the edge of an abandoned pier while the sun set gracefully over the water, and as the final rays of light disappeared into a star-filled sky she knew that there was only one thing to do to finish off this wonderful evening, which was to throw his severed appendage into the ocean’s depths so it could never be found again — and maybe to get some custard after'."
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32points
#7
"The 'big' cliches are not so bad. A princess locked in a tower, a boy who is secretly the heir to the throne, a guy has some weird thing happen to him and gets superpowers and becomes a superhero. The sort of over-arching plotline cliches might not be optimal but they are far from the worst thing you can do. People like that sort of familiarity.
What really kills a story is having a bunch of small cliches. What you might call sentence or paragraph cliches. Jokes we have seen before. Dialogue exchanges we have seen before. Scenes that play out in the exact way they have played out in other books. Description we have seen before. Your story can have the craziest, most original over-arching plotline, but if it's strung together with a bunch of cliches it will be boring."
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29points
#8
"Using too many words to describe what could easily be said in a few words. I'm guilty of this myself, but I try to cut down on it."
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28points
#9
HumanShadow said:
"Children who speak and act like adults."
"Children who speak and act like adults."
Dr-DudeMan-Jones replied:
"The thing is, kids are always trying to act like adults. The key is to write a kid who is trying (and failing) rather than writing a kid who is essentially an adult. I think Stranger Things does this very well. The frequent misuse of profanity also helps."
"The thing is, kids are always trying to act like adults. The key is to write a kid who is trying (and failing) rather than writing a kid who is essentially an adult. I think Stranger Things does this very well. The frequent misuse of profanity also helps."
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27points
#10
"Characters brushing off injuries... like if your hero just got stabbed, he's not gonna be ok right away.
Otherwise just not having a basic grasp of anatomy.
Conversely, heroes that never get injured at all Irk me.
Orcs or Drow as antagonists... its so overdone. Use illithids, or those dog ppl who's name I can never remember... also just the "race that is evil" trope in general is so bland."
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24points
#11
"Infantilizing mental illness, or 'curing' mental illness by getting laid.
Sometimes the infantilization of mental illness almost crosses into the 'born s*xy yesterday' trope, which really just tips it over into being distasteful on many levels."
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24points
#12
"Describing the clothes of a character in so much detail that it ends up being two paragraphs."
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23points
#13
"'It was a dark and stormy night.' While it worked for Madeline L’Engle, it didn’t work for Snoopy."
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22points
#14
"If a plan is explained before it happens, it will fail. If it's not explained it will work out just fine."
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22points
#15
"Avoid the "God in the machine". Sudden and contrived resolutions of unsolvable issues by a surprise and slightly unbelievable intervention."
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22points
#17
"'He could see anger in her eyes, and a hint of dissatisfaction, maybe a trace of sorrow as well.'
People don’t see all emotion in the eyes, but loads of stories are written like this, where a character can look in someone’s eyes and see their entire emotional spectrum. Emotions are seen in the entire face, not to mention body language as a whole."
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21points
#18
"Zombies apocalypses... I'm thinking why is this still a thing.
Oh, and Vampires hitting on teenage chicks too."
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21points
#20
"I learned this from Stephen King’s On Writing: Don’t use adverbs if at all possible.
Don’t say that John did something sadly. Show why he’s sad he did it. Show don’t tell."
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19points