by Laurence D'Orsay

The foremost earmark of the beginner; ideas for avoiding its use

This story was originally published in June of 1933 in Writer's Digest. Extensive research discovered no copyright renewal.

In the writing of fiction to please discriminating readers of sophisticated mind and good taste, quite as much depends on saying things brightly as upon having bright things to say.

An essentially bright thing can be said in a dull way, and then it is no longer bright. Editors dub such slips a literary cliché, which means a piece of stale, trite, banal writing.

On the contrary, an essential commonplace may be put very brightly, and then it is no longer dull and ordinary. It is promoted, perhaps, from the cliché to the epigram.

Let us see how A. B. N. (Any Big Name) writes. Perhaps we may find out why ABN manages to say the thing better than other writers do when they aim at the same markets and readers. To be precise, we are dealing with the start of Zona Gale's story, "Rainbow's End," in the April Redbook.

"When a man has wanted a son for years—has imagined himself with a son, little, then older, then manly—it is a shock to him to arrive at forty, and to have no son.

"Forty! 'Good God,' thought Arthur Bellamy, 'I really must do something about a son.'

"Not that he had not, so to say, moved upon his son earlier. He had been in love with Eliza Hancock. He had gone through the reverence, anxiety and joy of his courtship of her, all the time never doubting, in some obscure anteroom of him, that of course she would marry him. He had thought much about that son of theirs, had weighed his qualities, calculated the time when they would take their first fishing-trip together. And then, blindingly, Eliza had refused him."

~

Now, anybody can see this is an excellent start. Not only does it make a strong and general appeal by the nature of the point immediately played up, but the clever expression of that point attracts every reader who likes bright writing better than dull. It isn't merely the kind of a beginning that appeals to me or to you personally, or the kind that appeals to Miss Gale's loyal legion; it is an opening sure to appeal to everyone sufficiently educated and intelligent to read a magazine of Redbook's class. Indeed, it would please and interest countless readers of inferior mental stature, persons unable to comprehend and appreciate most of the fine points in many of the stories Redbook publishes. They might not see just what was unusually fine in Miss Gale's start, but they would sense the fact that she was writing about a common thing—a man's desire for a son—in an uncommon and distinctive way.

Notice how she gives a bit of essentially uninteresting and quite ordinary retrospect in the third paragraph. Arthur wanted to marry a girl once upon a time, but she wouldn't have him. One might ask, "Well, who cares?" We have only just met Arthur, and he would be an utter stranger in the hands of a less clever writer.

But see what Miss Gale does with this little chunk of bromidic statement, this trite and hackneyed banality. With the sheer prodigality of genius—for Zona Gale comes near being a genius as a short-story writer —she casually tosses off a tabloid short story in less than one hundred words in her third paragraph, complete with dramatic problem, conflict, viewpoint, logical development, and surprise climax — 'And then, blindingly, Eliza had refused him."

Note the power force gained from the use of the word "blindingly."

I will try to rewrite the start as it might have been done by one of those writers who wonder why the editor printed Zona Gale's story in preference to theirs. I shall rewrite this bit in the cliché manner of the civic club speaker, whose bromides and_ banal phrases are copied by so many inexperienced writers able to do better if they would set mind and fancy free.

Arthur Bellamy had wanted a son for years. Although strongly imbued with paternal instincts and parental feeling, he had never been blessed by the gods with that olive branch he so keenly desired. Not his the joy of dandling a little toddler on his knee; not his the pride of watching the tender sapling grow into the strong young oak; not his the delight of guiding Young Hopeful's eager footsteps through the puzzling maze of life; not his the satisfaction of giving fatherly counsel, and having his wise admonitions obeyed as if they came from on high through the rosebud lips of a shining angel.

(Yes, I know this is 1933, and I'm well aware that my own son doesn't think my wise admonitions come from a shining angel. But I'm just trying to "bring 'em back alive"; I'm roaming the literary jungles and capturing quaint would-be fathers as they are written about in stories.)

When he reached the age of forty, Arthur Bellamy decided that, if he wished to have a son to comfort his declining years, he should no longer live in a state of single blessedness, but must find some member of the fair sex willing to unite with him in the bonds of holy matrimony.

This was not the first time he had thought of entering that sacred estate, that keystone of civilization, that enveloping fold of all righteous parenthood and happy childhood. He had been in love, years ago, with a young woman named Eliza Hancock. Smitten by the arrows of Cupid, that little naked blind god, his thoughts were wafted into the empyrean on the wings of love's young dream, and he expected Eliza would accept his hand and heart, and present him with offspring. The fair charmer, however, refused his proposal of a matrimonial alliance.

If Miss Gale should chance to read this revised version of her work, she may get the jitters.

~

What is a literary cliché? What is trite? What is banal? What is hackneyed, stilted, bromidic, mouldy? Well, of course it depends on the way the moth-eaten phrase or sentence is used. If written seriously in the evident belief that it is good writing, it may be pretty awful. But if written as a sly joke, a bit of deft satire or burlesque, it may be amusing and effective. My version of Miss Gale's start is packed full of clichés—banal phrases; stilted, stupid, pretentious bits of verbiage when used as I have used and connected them. Yet it would be foolish and wrong to say that any single one of those phrases should never be used in writing a story. On the contrary, even such a horror as "dandling a little toddler on his knee" might be worked into some particular connection very neatly and effectively, but the writer would have to realize the extreme banality of the phrase in order to do that. The point is to perceive the cliché—to detect its horrid odor as soon as it comes within range of your literary nostrils. Then you are safe. If you decide you can use it for your immediate purpose in what you are writing, you won't use it in a cliché way if you know what it is.

Notice the clever, original, deft, forceful turns of phrasing Miss Gale uses. "I really must do something about a son." A quaint way for a man to put it to himself, but how natural, human, and illuminating! Our ruling beliefs, passions, and impulses often linger in the obscure anterooms of our minds, out of sight and almost out of mind until summoned into conclusive action by a crisis; but few people realize this truth, either in life or in the writing of fiction. (If they did, husbands wouldn't moan, "I never thought she'd run out on me," and wives wouldn't wail, "I can't think what he sees in that creature." )

Against Miss Gale's masterly fragment of good writing, admirable in itself even when snatched from the mosaic pattern into which it fits, array for contrast some of my threadbare clichés. I will mention a few, and you can easily find others in the passage.

"Blessed by the gods with that olive branch."

"Watching the tender sapling grow into the strong young oak."

"Guiding Young Hopeful's eager footsteps."

"Comfort his declining years."

"State of single blessedness."

"Some member of the fair sex." (Five words to say a word of five letters, "woman" !)

"Smitten by the arrows of Cupid."

"The wings of love's young dream."

"The fair charmer."

That prolific and apparently effortless humorist, P. G. Wodehouse, is a master of the use of clichés and mouldy banalities. He has them on nearly every page of his numerous novels and short stories, but is never himself banal. He is always poking fun at the motheaten old phrases and ideas he is using or making his characters use. Take, for example, the opening of "Mutliner Nights":

"The conversation in the bar parlor of the Anglers' Rest had turned to the subject of the regrettably low standard of morality prevalent among the nobility and landed gentry of Great Britain.

Miss Postlethwaite, our erudite barmaid, had brought the matter up by mentioning that in the novelette which she was reading a viscount had just thrown a family solicitor over a cliff.

"Because he had found out his guilty secret,' explained Miss Postlethwaite, polishing a glass a little severely, for she was a good woman. 'It was his guilty secret this solicitor had found out, so the viscount threw him over a cliff. I suppose, if one did but know, that sort of thing is going on all the time.' "

Miss Postlethwaite is a perfect exponent of the cliché, and Wodehouse uses her as such. But he does not hesitate to put atrocious banalities and stilted sentence into his first-person narration over and over again. For example:

"It seemed to Lancelot that life was very full and beautiful. He lived joyously in the present, giving no thought to the past. But how true it is that the past is inextricably mixed up with the present, and that we can never tell when it may not spring some delayed bomb bencath our feet."

Wodehouse knows, of course, that this obvious bit of bromidic philosophy is the height of banality. He offers it, with apparent seriousness but with his tongue in his cheek, in order to work up one of his innumerable humorous situations, and he does the same thing hundreds of times in every one of his books. So do other good modern humorists. The cliché, deftly used, is the chief article of their stock-in-trade. They are continually poking fun at ancient wheezes, stilted nonsense and decrepit sentences, used in perfect seriousness by other writers less experienced or less gifted with a strong sense of the ridiculous. Every editor knows the writer who solemnly tries to inform his readers (confined to the editorial office), that the past is inextricably mixed up with the present, that there are skeletons in most family cupboards, and that (assuming you to be more or less villainous) you can never tell when some nasty thing may come to light and blow you sky high.

In the Wodehouse story I have previously quoted, the conclusion is a 100 per cent cliché wind-up; but every cliché is deliberate.

Wodehouse purposely writes one mouldy sentence after another, copying the typical happy ending of the banal sentimental novelettes read by Miss Postlethwaite and her ilk.

"Little remains to be told. Adrian and Millicent were married three months later at a fashionable West End church. All society was there. The presents were both numerous and costly, and the bride looked charming. The service was conducted by the Very Reverend the Dean of Bittlesham.

"It was in the vestry afterwards, as Adrian looked at Millicent, and seemed to realize for the first time that all his troubles were over and that this lovely girl was indeed his, for better or worse, that a full sense of his happiness swept over the young man."

Unless you are obviously employing it, as Wodehouse and other funsters continually do, to develop a humorous situation or win a satirical effect, the use of the literary cliché marks you as a beginner in the editor's eyes. "Little remains to be told." Then why not tell that "little" in an interesting, bright way, instead of stopping to talk about it? "This lovely girl was indeed his." The reader knows it, and so do Adrian and "all society." Why mention it? You are only repeating stale breath; only dishing up, in all these trite old sentences and whiskery ideas, some borrowed left-overs from our ancestors' literary dinners; cold potatoes gone sour.

~

The big point, of course, is how to avoid the literary cliché; how to take care one doesn't stumble into that fatal pitfall of the trite, the bromidic, and the banal which I have tried to point out by my paraphrase of Zona Gale's start and these quotations from Wodehouse. Nothing is more helpful than reading modern satirical humorists, such as Wodehouse himself, Stephen Leacock, and columnists like Ted Cook. When you see how the keen lances of their sly ridicule continually puncture the tattered rags of thousands of clichés, you will perceive what kind of stuff is banal, and never be in doubt about it any more. Only when you realize that all these "borrowed trimmings of yesterday" are either intentionally or unintentionally funny, are you safe.

But it's just too bad when the humor is unintentional, and the editor smiles at the writer, instead of smiling with him, seeing that he has packed his stuff full of clichés without realizing what they are.

May I offer an earnest suggestion:

Take a passage in any story which strikes you as being unusually powerful, novel in viewpoint and treatment, clever, fresh, or well expressed. Rewrite that passage in an ordinary, inexpressive, commonplace way, the way it would be written by most persons; cramming in the antiquated phrases, as I did in my rewrite of Zona Gale. Then compare the two versions and notice very closely, word by word and sentence by sentence, what makes the original so much better than its paraphrase. If this does not teach you to avoid the pitfall of the cliché, nothing will.

But, of course, such deliberate, purposeful comparative analysis is an education in itself for most writers, if undertaken honestly and keenly. Like careful study of the humorists who use the stale, sour old wheezes and phrases to deride them, it will teach you what to avoid; and it will also show you what to write instead, which is even more important if one wants to write stories and sell them. It's like clearing a lot of rubbishy, ugly, old-fashioned furniture out of a room. That's all to the good, but you don't want an empty room; you have to furnish it afterwards to suit your modern taste, which, like the reader's taste in fiction, has advanced far beyond those hideous objects proudly displayed in the "front parlor" in the Mauve Decade.

Think over Zona Gale's start. Regard it as a lesson which may be applied and adapted in countless ways according to what you are dealing with in your own story at the moment. You cannot possibly pick a staler and more obvious thing than she did— a middle-aged man's longing to have a son and heir, involving the necessity of finding a woman to marry. The clichés, banalities, and stilted moralizings about motherhood and fatherhood are, perhaps, the most notorious of all—the standing joke of the editorial office. But Zona Gale proved once again that nothing is stale in writing unless you make tt so by writing it in a stale way.

Writing simply doesn't necessarily mean writing the cliché. As a rule, it means avoiding it. Most of the sour, cold potatoes are served up in flowery, stilted, pretentious verbiage. Such terse sentences as "Jesus wept" and "God is love" are simple enough, but they certainly aren't clichés in the connections in which they are used in the Bible.

Here are four "horrible examples" I have concocted. They may be used for exercises —practice work. Try rewriting them in a novel, sensible, attractive way that might conceivably take the curse off their hackneyed, stilted banality in an editor's eyes.

1. She swooned towards him in the delirious ecstasy of love's awakening. Their eyes were glued upon cach other. He clasped her to his manly bosom, and their lips met in a long, lingering kiss.

2. "You have baffled me now, but my time will come. Look not for mercy, Jack Dalton, when I hold the upper hand. The girl is yours, and you laugh at me now; but remember there will be another day when I shall wring your hearts." (Exit the villain, planning dirty work at the crossroads. )

3. Tears welled in the old lady's eyes, and chased each other down her wrinkled cheeks. "I am your mother, my son," she said feebly. "When you were a babe, I hugged you to my breast and hushed your childish sobs. Do not repay me now by base ingratitude. A boy's best friend is his mother, and he should always heed and obey her."

4. Fire flashed from the basilisk eves of the haughty society queen. Turning balefully upon the pallid, astonished shopgirl, she cried: "Little do you know with whom you are dealing. Reginald Van Puyster is my affianced husband, and I, too, am a woman, although I move in a social circle whose rarified air you cannot hope to breathe."

A point one should remember is that many successful writers have become distinguished from others in the eyes of readers through words and phrases which they have coined, or which they continually use. These cannot be considered clichés, for they are purposely used as a sort of label or trade-mark, the idea being to fix the author and his typical characters and material in the reader's mind through the power of association. Octavus Roy Cohen's darkies, for example, frequently say that something or other "Ain't nothing else but." Walter Winchell is fond of telling us that "Mary and John have pffft." Ted Cook can't get along without his "famous last words" every day, and Wodehouse loves to make a character "totter" and "utter an animal cry" when another character makes some "fruity" remark to him.

There is no copyright in such associative tags, of course. You can swipe them if you wish without fear of being arrested and prosecuted, but such borrowing of somebody else's pet literary invention is commonly regarded as professionally unethical and unfair. When an editor detects it, he does not trust or like the writer again. The trick is rather cheap and mean. Get your own tags, and respect the rights of others to theirs.

Conan Doyle tagged Sherlock Holmes by many mannerisms, habits, and characteristic remarks. They were reiterated over and over again through a very long series of stories, but, instead of becoming stale, tedious clichés they built up the character that stands out most sharply in the whole range of modern fiction. If you are ever tempted to copy the tags, characters, and distinctive "lines" of successful writers, just pause to reflect that no other detective recognizably like Sherlock Holmes has ever appeared on the printed page. Why? Not because inexperienced writers haven't offered hundreds of more or less close copies. Because the editors thought Conan Doyle had a right to Sherlock Holmes himself, and knew the readers thought so, too. Some of the other cliché phrases in this same script follow. Read these carefully to see if you, too, are ever guilty of unintentionally using these time-worn, ancient phrases to express your thoughts—when you should be using your own original and personally molded ideas.

Sun-kissed valley;

Carpeting of rich green;

Spurned his love;

My love for him still abides;

Her visitor was none other than;

I longed to unbosom myself;

A home nestling in the valley;

My readers may garner from this tale;

Happy to renew old friendships;

Clutches of the law;

Cudgled his brain;

This tramp, this grey-haired derelict;

(Diamond) baubles of paste;

Leaded death sped;

Sought restful beds in slumber.

These segments quoted from one manuscript sent us are not meant to ridicule the writer who wrote them. Seventy per cent of the scripts we receive are replete with literary clichés. They are the unquestioned absolute earmark of the unsuccessful writer.

Be honest with yourself. Now, read through a story that you have on hand and see whether or not it is damned with the literary cliché. Once you recognize it, you will never again be guilty of using it unintentionally, But you can only learn to recognize it by unmerciful scrutiny of your own work.