Cliché in Fiction
Quick answer: Cliché in fiction is language or plotting worn smooth by overuse. Learn to spot dead phrases and stock scenes, and how to replace them with observed detail.
A cliché is a phrase, image, character or plot move so overused that it no longer produces any effect: language worn smooth as an old coin, passing from hand to hand without anyone feeling it. To say it another way, a cliché is a ready-made thought, and readers register it as the absence of thinking. The word comes from French printing, where a cliché was a stereotype plate cast to reprint the same block endlessly, which remains a perfect description.
Clichés infiltrate every layer of fiction: the sentence (her heart pounded), the character (the grizzled detective with a drink problem), the scene (the villain explaining his plan) and the plot (it was all a dream). They are chiefly a revision problem, because everyone drafts in them.
A dark and stormy night, forever
Edward Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with 'It was a dark and stormy night', then piled on rain in torrents and wind rattling the housetops. The line was ordinary in its day; repetition since has made it the most famous bad opening in English, complete with an annual contest for deliberately terrible first sentences held in its honour. Nothing is wrong with the grammar. What died was the freshness: ten thousand imitations wore the groove until the words stopped carrying weather and started carrying only other books.
That is the diagnostic worth memorising: a cliché no longer points at the world, it points at previous writing. When a reader meets 'her blood ran cold', they picture nothing; they merely register that fear was intended, the way a stamp registers postage.
Why clichés cost more than they seem to
Clichés are anaesthetic. Each one is a small patch of prose where the reader's imagination is not required, and enough patches put the whole reading mind to sleep. They also leak into judgment: an editor meeting three stock phrases on page one reasonably predicts stock feeling to follow, and in contest settings that prediction is fatal, since freshness of language is precisely what the Originality and Voice mark on Writory's rubric exists to reward.
In fairness, clichés survive because they are efficient: everyone understands them instantly, which is why dialogue can use them deliberately. Real people speak in clichés, and a character who says 'everything happens for a reason' at a funeral is characterised by it. The sin is the narrator thinking in them.
Hunting clichés out of a short story
Draft freely; clichés are scaffolding and stopping to fight them mid-flow kills momentum. In revision, do a dedicated pass for them. Suspect any phrase you have heard before, any comparison that arrived without effort, and anything a stock photo could illustrate. Then replace from observation: not 'her heart pounded' but the specific thing this character does with fear, checking the door twice, laughing at the wrong moment.
The trap is the thesaurus fix, swapping a cliché's words while keeping its dead thought: 'her heart hammered' is the same coin polished. The repair is always re-seeing, going back to the imagined moment and reporting what is actually there. Fresh language is a symptom of fresh attention, never a substitute for it.
The usual suspects: a starter watch-list
Every writer's private list differs, but the entries below appear on most editors' first page of notes. Treat them as a metal detector rather than a law: any can be redeemed by enough specificity, and none survives being used exactly as found.
Cliché, trope, idiom: sorting the shelf
A trope is a recognisable pattern that may still be full of life; a cliché is a pattern or phrase that has died of exposure. The border moves with time and audience: the twist that stunned readers in 1990 may be a cliché at a workshop today. An idiom, meanwhile, is ordinary language, 'raining cats and dogs' as everyday speech, and only becomes a literary cliché when prose leans on it for vividness it no longer has.
Stock characters overlap with cliché from the character side, and dead metaphors from the sentence side. The common thread is automation: wherever words or story moves arrive pre-assembled, the term cliché is waiting.
What poets can take from this
- Do one revision pass hunting only clichés, separately from all other editing.
- Suspect any phrase that arrived effortlessly and any image a stock photo could illustrate.
- Repair by re-observing the moment, never by swapping synonyms into the dead phrase.
- Allow characters to speak in clichés when it characterises them; keep the narrator's mind fresh.
- Keep a private list of your personal recurring clichés; every writer has a top five.
Try it yourself
Write a 300-word scene of a character receiving terrible news by phone, with the following banned: pounding hearts, running blood, stomachs (dropping or knotting), breath (caught or held), and time slowing down. Report only what this particular body and kitchen actually do.
Questions
How do I know if a phrase is a cliché?
Test whether it makes you picture anything. If the words summon no image and merely signal an intended emotion, they have died. A quicker filter: if you have met the exact phrase in other books, assume it is worn out and re-observe the moment.
Can clichés ever be used on purpose?
Yes, mainly in dialogue and close narration, where a character who thinks in ready-made phrases is being characterised by them. Comic fiction also revives clichés by taking them literally. What rarely survives is a narrator using them earnestly for vividness.
Are clichéd plots as bad as clichéd sentences?
They are slower to show but costlier, since a stock plot wastes a whole story where a stock phrase wastes a line. The remedy is the same at both scales: specificity drawn from observation, which no other writer can duplicate.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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