Making It New: Writing Past Cliche
In brief: Broken hearts, silent tears, shattered dreams: the reader has met them all a thousand times. This lesson is about writing the feeling as if it had never...
Here is the most common note a contest judge could write, if judges wrote notes on every poem: competent but familiar. The poem is sincere. The grammar holds. The feeling is real. And yet the judge has read this exact poem, in slightly different clothes, forty times this month. Nothing in it is wrong; nothing in it is yours. Of the five things a Writory judge scores, creativity carries the most points, and cliche is where those points quietly leave the room.
The unfair part is that cliches feel true when you write them. They feel true because they are true: hearts do feel broken, nights are dark, time does seem to heal. The problem is not honesty. A cliche is an image that has been handled so often it no longer transfers feeling; it asks the reader to remember an emotion instead of having one. This lesson shows you how to catch borrowed language in your drafts, and four working methods for replacing it with something only you could have written.
Why Cliches Happen to Honest Poets
When you reach for words in the heat of feeling, the first ones that arrive are communal property. They arrive first precisely because you have heard them most: song lyrics, greeting cards, a thousand posts. First-thought language is the language of everyone, which is why it belongs to no one. Writing it down is not a failure of sincerity; it is a failure of patience. The poets you admire had the same first thoughts. They waited for the third.
It helps to understand what a cliche actually does to a reader. A fresh image makes the reader build the picture themselves, and that small act of building is where the feeling happens. A cliche hands them a picture already assembled, flat-packed and pre-felt. The reader nods and moves on, untouched. This is why a judge can call a poem full of real grief unmoving: the grief was real, but the language did the remembering instead of the feeling.
The rule that follows is simple to say and hard to obey: first thought, second thought, third thought, take the third. When you catch yourself writing the moon watched over me, stop. Ask what the moon was actually doing that night, in that sky, over that street. The second thought is usually the first thought reversed. The third is where you start sounding like yourself.
The Cliche Audit
You cannot fix what you cannot see, and cliches are hardest to see in your own draft because they arrived dressed as feelings. So audit mechanically. First, circle the furniture nouns: heart, soul, tears, darkness, light, storm, wings, scars, fire, dreams. None of these words is forbidden, but each one is a place where a thousand poems have stood before yours, so each one must earn its spot with new work.
Second, underline every adjective-noun pair and ask whether the two words chose each other or came pre-married. Silent tears, gentle breeze, deep darkness, bitter end, warm embrace: if you have heard the pair spoken aloud in ordinary life, the pair is doing no work. Swap one partner and watch the phrase wake up: a bureaucratic breeze, tears with an agenda, a darkness the colour of old tea.
Third, run the greeting-card test on every image: could this exact line appear on a sympathy card or a motivational poster without anyone blinking? If yes, it is not an image, it is upholstery. Be ruthless here, because the judge will be. A poem is rarely sunk by one familiar phrase; it is sunk by the accumulation, the sense that every window in the poem looks out on scenery the reader has already photographed.
Making the Familiar Strange Again
The oldest tool in the box is defamiliarization: describe the thing as if you had never seen it before and had no word for it. A ring becomes a small gold zero that means forever. Grief becomes learning to set the table for one fewer plate. The technique works because it forces you below the label, down to the actual object, and objects are where feeling lives. Nobody cries over the word grandmother; they cry over her kettle refusing to whistle for anyone else.
The second tool is the specificity ladder. Every abstraction sits at the top of a ladder whose bottom rungs are things that happened. Love is the top rung. She saves me the last bite without being asked is a bottom rung. Sadness is the top; the bottom is I have stopped correcting people who say her name wrong. Climb down. The judge's rubric calls this originality of idea and imagery, but it is really just altitude: the lower you go, the fewer poets have stood there, because no one else lived your Tuesday.
Third, shift something. Shift the sense: let a sound have a colour, let a memory have a temperature. Shift the scale: the end of a marriage seen from the height of the ceiling fan, a war seen from inside a bread oven. Shift the viewpoint: let the hospital chair describe the waiting, let the borrowed umbrella describe the funeral. Any one shift, done once and committed to, will carry a poem out of the familiar. Done timidly, half a line at a time, it reads as decoration; the shift must be load-bearing.
Fresh Metaphor Is Built, Not Found
Waiting for a brilliant metaphor to arrive is like waiting for lightning with a kite string. Working poets build metaphors instead, and the method is almost embarrassingly mechanical. Column one: list the literal properties of your subject. Heartbreak: it arrives suddenly, it changes daily routines, it is invisible to strangers, it makes food taste like nothing. Column two: list the worlds you know better than most people, your job, your city, your kitchen, your sport, your commute. Now cross the columns and look for sparks. A nurse writes: grief does its rounds at night. An electrician writes: we never rewired the house, we just stopped using that room. A cricketer writes: love declared too early, like an innings.
Notice what makes those work: the surprise is still true. Surprise without truth is randomness, and judges can smell randomness a stanza away; a metaphor must click as strange and correct in the same instant. Test every built metaphor by asking someone to finish it: if you say grief does its rounds and they can feel why rounds is right, the metaphor holds. If you have to explain it, it is a private joke, not an image.
This is also, quietly, the whole secret of a distinct voice. Your voice is not a font; it is your specific knowledge applied to the common subjects. Everyone writes about loss, love, mothers, rain. Only you can write about them through the particular things your hands know. The judge who reads forty grief poems will remember the one where grief was measured in unwashed teacups, and the creativity score follows the remembering.
When to Keep a Cliche, and How to Break One on Purpose
Two honest exceptions. In spoken idiom and dialogue, cliches are realism: people actually say I am fine, it is what it is, and a character who speaks in fresh metaphors sounds like a poet wearing a costume. And in formal verse, a familiar phrase can serve as a resting note between two difficult lines, the way a plain chord makes the strange chord land. The test is intent: a cliche you chose is a tool; a cliche you did not notice is a leak.
The most satisfying move of all is the deliberate break: take the dead phrase and turn it in your hand until it cuts again. Time heals nothing; it just changes the wound's address. My heart was not broken, it was repossessed. Follow your dreams, mine keep filing restraining orders. The reader arrives expecting the old furniture, and you have moved the walls. This works because cliches carry enormous stored energy, a thousand readings' worth, and turning one releases all of it at once. It is the one time the familiar phrase pays you back for every poem it ever flattened.
Competent but familiar
My heart is broken into pieces,
tears fall like rain from my eyes.
The darkness surrounds my lonely soul
as I whisper my final goodbyes.
Every image arrives pre-assembled: broken heart, tears like rain, surrounding darkness, lonely soul. The feeling is real, but the reader has nothing to build, so nothing transfers.
The same grief, made new
I still cook rice for two, then eat
standing up, so it counts as one.
The phone keeps offering me your name
wherever I try to type run.
No heart, no tears, no darkness. Two bottom-rung specifics (the rice, the autocorrect) carry the same grief, and the reader assembles the feeling themselves, which is what makes them feel it.
Exercises
- Take any old draft and run the full audit: circle the furniture nouns, underline the pre-married adjective-noun pairs, and greeting-card-test every image. Count the leaks before you fix a single one.
- Write the top rung of the ladder you keep reaching for (love, grief, hope), then climb down five rungs to things that actually happened, each more specific than the last. Write the poem from the bottom rung and never say the top word.
- Build a metaphor with the two-column method: ten literal properties of your subject on the left, three worlds you know intimately on the right. Cross them until one clicks as strange and true at once.
- Choose the deadest phrase you know and break it on purpose: keep its first half, betray its second. Write the poem the new version demands.
Key takeaways
- A cliche is not a lie; it is an image handled so often it no longer transfers feeling. The reader remembers instead of feels.
- Audit mechanically: furniture nouns, pre-married pairs, the greeting-card test. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
- Climb the specificity ladder downward: the lower the rung, the fewer poets have stood there, because no one else lived your Tuesday.
- Build metaphors with the two-column method, and test that the surprise is still true: strange and correct in the same instant.
- Your voice is your specific knowledge aimed at the common subjects, and a cliche you chose is a tool; one you did not notice is a leak.
Related lessons
Part of Writing Techniques in the free Writory Academy: about 9 minutes, Intermediate level, with a quiz that counts toward a signed certificate on the Certificate Track. By the Writory editorial team. Updated July 2026.