cliche | cliche
Feb.07.2013
last weekend we spent in Venice and had a wonderful time: the whole city was celebrating the Carnival of Venice. We walked the streets surrounded by grown- ups dressed in elaborated period costumes and covered in masks.
When we got back my daughter asked me why I didn’t write...
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Jan.08.2013
Having just reviewed a m/s from a talented young aspiring mystery writer, let me pass on the same (potentially deflating) advice: in all but two* (footnote below) "locked room" mysteries ever published, the writer has performed countless acrobatics to distract the reader from realizing that the...
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Jun.19.2012
When Victoria Johnson invited me to write a guest blog about what I would tell my 16-year-old self, I instantly had an image of being sixteen and looking at myself in the mirror--an image I kept dismissing. I had a template in my mind about what I should want to tell myself at that age...
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Jun.20.2011
When in doubt you can check this site out. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Welcome to ClichéSite.com.
ClichéSite.com has amassed a list of over 2100 clichés, euphamisms, sayings and figures of speech complete with definitions and explanations.
Finding...
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Feb.12.2011
Some of my colleagues live in absolute fear of cliché. They are so hung up on it that we’ve had discussions on whether or not it is permissible to have characters within a story speaking in cliché. As a person who has always listened to the voice of real people, the discussion is pointless. In...
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Jul.09.2010
Welcome to a four-part series on editing your work for clarity and publication. There's nothing like clear communication to get a point across. Even writers of literary fiction need to know what they want to say and how best to say it, how to obscure and reveal. For clarity in revelation, we'll...
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Apr.29.2010
So, is the phrase/explanation/metaphor "too many hands stirring the pot" a universal phrase to convey the situation at hand, or a cliché?
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Aug.20.2009
Cliche manifesto
THE cliché MANIFESTO!
As a writer of screenplays among other things, with many friends and aquantiences of a similar writerly persuasion, I've decided to do a publc service to us all and put down some scenes, plot devices, etc. that have been absolutely done to...
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Apr.23.2009
"fall" and "precipitously"
As in, "Today we saw stocks fall precipitously."
For one thing, "precipitously" is way too codependent, following "fall" around like a puppy dog, as if there's no other word in the world it could modify. (I mean, even...
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Nov.11.2008
Are you as sick of that whole glass-half-empty/half-full saying as I am? Not only is it clichéd, it’s a ridiculous analogy. How you see a glass has nothing to do with your optimism or lack thereof.
When you are filling a glass (or any container) and you get to the halfway mark, the glass is half-...
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