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.
#41
"For my college English class this semester we have been reviewing these student published essays. I swear if I have to read another essay that has the phrase, “The Oxford English Dictionary defines...” I’m throwing the goddamn book out the window."
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12points
#42
"Not even a writer but you don’t need to be so descriptive.
I’ve read 300-page books that should really be 150 pages, because half of the book is someone describing every single atom of every single object in the room their in. Old books tend to be guilty of this more."
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12points
#43
"Something I've noticed about a lot of authors, but particularly fantasy authors, is their surprising conservatism when it comes to hereditary rulership. The dispossessed son of the King will be helped by people who will sacrifice anything for them, and for what? So that someone can be in charge based on which specific womb he fell out of? Knights, dukes, Lords all get way more respect and justification than they deserve."
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12points
#44
"Overused phrases like 'crystal clear' or 'avoid like the plague' should probably be avoided like unvaccinated kids."
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12points
#46
"Awful love scenes filled with terrible euphemisms.
Although it would spell the end for the yearly "Bad S*x in Fiction" competition, soooo... maybe don't stop quite yet."
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11points
#49
"Using 3948673457 adjectives and 9 pages to describe literally everything in the story does not make you a good writer. Get to the point."
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11points
#50
"If doing a fantasy Sci-Fi thing please avoid making your character super op that nothing can hurt him.
Takes away tension and done too often
Unless that's the whole point (kinda like one punch man.)"
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11points
#51
"You don't have to tell me every little detail of every little event, but don't be lazy either and just go "yadda yadda yadda, so and so did this, and now here I am". Like, put some effort, but don't be like, 'Like a beastly baying black bull in a fragile china shop, full of intricately decorated dragon plates, I...' STOP."
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11points
#52
"Swearing at the end of the book when things are getting heated up. This only works in books meant for 11-16 year olds, when swearing is still taboo for many of them. In young adult, either the character should swear some of the time or not at all. This is because most of us swear like sailors anyways, so the gravity is lost on your audience."
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11points
#53
"The 'huge beam shooting towards the sky with rubble swirling around it' is what we need to destroy to win the day."
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11points
#54
"'Really' is almost always superfluous. Only use it if you're pushing up your word count."
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11points
#55
"The alarm clock opening. Just... no.
Even worse is the alarm clock ending, which is just like the opening, but at the very last part, and even worse because it also uses the 'entire thing was just a dream' cliche."
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10points
#56
der_komrade said:
"As strong as an ox."
"As strong as an ox."
Loyalty1702 replied:
"As smooth as a child."
"As smooth as a child."
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10points
#58
"Epithets. 'The older man looked at the blonde.'
Also insane dialogue tags. '...he whispered,' '...she shouted gruffly,' '...he posited.' For the vast majority of dialogue, 'said' is best. It disappears, while stuff like the above distracts the reader and interrupts the flow of the story.
And please think about what your narrator knows, believes, etc. Think about how they talk to themselves in their head. Is a grizzled old working-class cop going to describe a sunset as 'luminous strata of gold and blue dappled with fiery cloud?' Uh, probably not. It doesn’t matter if a turn of phrase is what you as the writer like. If it doesn’t fit the narrative tone... axe it."
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10points
#59
"Do not start sentences with 'So'. STOP THAT NOISE. Maybe once in a while, but not all the time."
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10points
#60
"One thought shouldn’t take five sentences to get out before the action happens. Decision making should be split second and then the reasoning should be told, not the other way around."
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9points