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.
#61
"Not sure this is what you're looking for, but I see it all the time in brief, blurb-y writing as well as formal e-mails, letters, presentations, and even court documents. Acronyms almost never add clarity or meaning to your writing. Whenever you have the urge to use one, please consider one of the words within the phrase you're abbreviating. Usually, there's a juicy, clear, legible noun right in the middle of that acronym that would be so much easier to read. EPA--> Agency. CLP-->Loan. POTUS-->President. Sometimes the full phrase adds meaning, so use it initially. But no reader is saying the full thing to themselves every time you use that acronym.
That acronym doesn't make you seem like an insider, it just makes you seem ill-spoken."
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9points
#62
"Saying 'painted' as a more artful way to say described.
Visceral is another awful one."
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9points
#63
"Chosen one tropes, "Wiser than their years" (children that are better at 'x' than professional adults in the same field,) and most egregiously, do not write in first person point of view unless its a character diary."
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8points
#64
"Anything involving the word “meld.” Also, expository writing in general."
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8points