Because without it, we wouldn't have a story
— Pretty much every writer, at one time or another.
Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It's what you do with the medium.
I am an unapologetic proponent of the Superhero movie. The genre has yielded enough genuinely great works during its relatively brief run at the pinnacle of international popular culture so as to forgive a lot of its missteps and I firmly believe it offers tremendous artistic and cultural value to those who would take advantage of it. Superheroes can make us laugh, give us catharsis, embody our fantasies, challenge our perceptions and give mythic weight to political metaphor. Sadly, they can also be stupid, ugly, wrong-headed, intellectually offensive and boring. And sometimes, they can be all that and more.
First, why don't we get some definitions clear. Writing and story are different things. A story is a sequence of related events. Period. A good story is a story that keeps people's attention. Not many stories are so interesting in their raw ingredients, that a mere reading of them adds up to good entertainment. You need a good storyteller to make a story interesting. You can have a bad story told by a good storyteller and it will still keep people's attention. It's much harder to keep people's attention with a good raw story and a weak storyteller. Strangely, everyone today seems to have opinions on writing and story. Vague ones for sure, but most folks are firm in their vague beliefs and the beliefs change from year to year. I know, because I changed a lot of the dogmatic faiths. I think maybe the reason everyone and his dog is an expert on writing is because everyone writes. Not everyone draws. Everyone knows the basic rudiments of writing and practices them every day. This gives great confidence to charlatans and executives. Writing is a medium of communication common to all humans. Art or music is harder to talk about because not everyone practices them. To be an artist you have to have obvious demonstrable ability that most normal people don't have. It's a lot harder to fake being an artist than being a writer. A singer who sings flat will make almost anyone cringe, probably even a cartoon executive. Clumsy writing though passes right under the noses of any executive, so management is easy prey for many used car salesmen types who sell them on their brilliant story ability.
I'll tell you exactly what they want, Senator. They want chase scenes and car crashes. They want firm breasts and tight-assed Latino men. They want their cowboys to be strong and silent. They want their cops to bend the rules to get the job done. They want the boy to get the girl. They want the alien to be killed, unless he's cute. They want the good guy to win, they want the bad guy to die, hopefully in the biggest explosion the budget will allow. But most importantly, Senator, they want to walk into a theater and for ninety minutes be able to forget about the fucking mess you have left of this nation.
— Peter Dragon, Action
This is what we want,
you know we had to wait a good while,
This is what we need,
To live out all the love that we read,
This ain't no new kinda story,
This ain't no new kinda story.
you know we had to wait a good while,
This is what we need,
To live out all the love that we read,
This ain't no new kinda story,
This ain't no new kinda story.
— Starflyer 59, "No New Kinda Story"
Norman: I just don't want to be cliché!
Chuck: It's not cliché, Norman, it's the formula, and it works!
Chuck: It's not cliché, Norman, it's the formula, and it works!
The finger gun battle with accounting does nothing to move the plot forward and ultimately is just filler that could and should've been cut... and I love it. *removes 3 sins*
— Dartigan in his Everything Wrong With Tales from the Borderlands video
Almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci, Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original writers borrowed from one another.
— Voltaire
A single, highly focused motivation—let's say "revenge," for example—can carry any number of novels; conversely, it can result in a clichéd story that employs eighty-three out of the 100 items on that list of "Things I Wouldn't Do If I Were An Evil Overlord" one finds floating around the Internet. It's why that desire for revenge developed, and how that vengeance is enacted, that makes a story worth telling.
— Elaine Cunningham at Something New with the Dragon
.
.Listen Rex: all we do is put old stuff together in new ways. Creativity is incremental, my boy! Let me tell you a story… Once upon a time, there were two bricklayers, okay? Imagine these two guys… Brothers. Now. The two of them have a pile of bricks each, and they can build whatever they want. The first one starts to lay bricks. The second brother just stands there and watches while this goes on. Finally he says, "That's how everyone else lays bricks! How about some originality? How about some innovation?" The first brother ignores him and keeps building. He puts up layer after layer of bricks. Eventually, a structure starts to take shape. People gather round. They gawk! Why? Because even though the elements of building are old, the sum of the parts is new, innovative, exciting, fresh. See?
— Barry, Rex Libris
By most expectations, anything involving ditzy demon girls and gaming-obsessed geekboys and a rotating lineup of high school beauties should have been the stuff of critical derision. Yet the show's sharp sense of humor, honest emotions, and polished production values prove that working with familiar clichés doesn't have to result in a clichéd product. With the right prodding and poking, any anime series can indeed become greater than the sum of its parts.
— Carlo Santos of Anime News Network reviewing The World God Only Knows
The mentor figure always ends up getting killed. I nearly didn't do it simply for that reason. However, I eventually decided that a good story is more important, sometimes, than avoiding the expected. Once in a while, you just have to do what feels right, even if that feeling leads you into areas that others have tread.
At some point, you'll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking into your own thing....In the end, imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the world that only you can add.
— Austin Kleon, author of "Steal Like an Artist"
I don't expect all genre conventions to be turned on their head. They're there for a reason, after all, but it takes a very good writer to take those conventions, own them and then write something truly special within their constraints.
— "The 'Rules' of Contemporary Romance", a blog post
", a blog postNo trope is too old as long as it works.
— Hong Kong idiom.
Talent borrows. Genius steals.
— Oscar Wilde
...Familiar, eh? This formula's been used over and over, especially in anime and JRPGs.
That doesn't mean that it's bad, however. It has been said that all the great stories have already been told, and that the difference is in the telling. That's where both Persona 3 and Persona 4 distinguish themselves, combining their gameplay mechanics and aesthetic/thematic inspirations to tell an old story in new, unique ways.
Turan mistakes archetypes for cliche. I don't share his view that the best scripts are only the ones that explore the perimeter of human experience, or flashily pirouette their witty and cynical dialogue for our admiration.
— James Cameron responding to Titanic (1997) being accused of being cliche
Don't avoid the cliches - they are cliches because they work!
Like a language, a genre is a set of norms that should ease communication, not imprison it. When you expand your outline, you should keep in mind what the audience expects and work with that. Your audience expects particular things, but you may not give it entirely what it expects, for that is part of how you maintain dramatic tension. Storytellers keep things lively by splicing genres and types of discourse together as a way to push or subvert expectations. The conventions, though old, are always in charge and always in negotiation. Like spoken language, they must evolve if they are to remain potent and useful.
— Michael Rabiger
There are a lot of books where a character runs away from home and sells their sword. There are a lot of books where a teenage character finds a mentor. The world of fantasy is full of magical artifacts that compel characters into interesting and improbable situations. And people fall in love and then back out of it every day of the week.
And then there’s this section of By The Sword, which has all of those things in the best possible way.
And then there’s this section of By The Sword, which has all of those things in the best possible way.
— Ellen Meyer's literary recaps
This is a classic Hollywood story move. Like all the other classic Hollywood story moves we know and love it feels comfortingly familiar yet still charming, apposite and poignant in the hands of good writers.
— Julian Hoxter, "The Pleasures of Structure"
Alright, let's talk about clichés for a moment. You can isolate any element of any story and call it "cliché". Clichés are stigmatized as unoriginal, but they're tools used to craft a story.
Here's the thing: when it comes to story and character ideas that don't work out as well as hoped, it's not always because the ideas themselves were actually that bad. Rather, the problem lies in the execution - something about the way they were carried out just doesn't work.
— Springhole.net, "How Good Story & Character Ideas Can Go Bad"
"When you just call something a "cliche", you are implying it's a bad thing, and that movies shouldn't use them. The problem with this is that if you are appealing to as wide an audience as possible, the usage of cliches is entirely unavoidable. You can't make a piece of fiction without them, lest you risk alienating a particular group of people. Considering this is an animated Disney movie, I'm fairly certain the goal was just that: to make something easy for even children to understand! What I'm saying is, this was a stylistic choice, opposed to a contrived one, and you really need to learn the difference!
— Th3Birdman, talking about CinemaSins constant use of "Cliche" sins in "Everything Wrong With CinemaSins: The Emperor's New Groove in 13 Minutes or Less".
". Changing the key up a half-step has kind of a bad reputation as a trick that songwriters pull to be able to stretch out a song with out having to write any new musicals, but here it's part of the arrangement working together with all of the musical ideas at play and it makes a very tangible contribution to the effect that this part of the piece was going for.
— 8-bit Music Theory, talking about key changes in Touhou Project music, more specifically of "Hartmann Youkai Girl".
key changes in Touhou Project music, more specifically of "Hartmann Youkai Girl". "Clichés are not good. Clichés are not bad. Clichés simply are."
"The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."
"And as an editor once told me, a story that is grammatically flawless, lays out plot points precisely according to the writer’s chosen beat sheets or journey model, stylistically seamless, and utterly without mistakes according to every objective measure... can still be boring."
— P.C. Wrede, Negative Bias, Readers, and the Internal Editor
"Since I'm drawing a karate manga, a scene with a fight against a weapons pro was unavoidable, but it was actually pretty tough. There really is no situation where it's advantageous to get in range if the weapon wielder doesn't make any clear mistakes... so what could I do but give him an exhaustion boner? Sometimes a lazy punchline works, though."
— mangaka Rui Takato regarding chapter 25 of Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!
"After Y2K the end of the world had become a cliché. But who was I to talk, a brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice. Everything was subjective. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."
Alba: But chloroform? Really? Isn't that a bit... You know, a bit of a trope?
Clara: There's a reason why tropes are tropes. It's because they work!
Clara: There's a reason why tropes are tropes. It's because they work!
