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Fiction Corner

"Call the cliché police!"

This is not what you want to hear when someone looks at your beloved work! It's the writers' equivalent of the fashion police. I've seen the same advice over and over; "Don't use clichés." But what do we use instead?

A good place to start is by scrawling out everything to do with the subject--synonyms and antonyms, words that might be vaguely connected with the subject, phrases that convey the same meaning as the cliché.

But you have to be careful what you choose. If I were looking to replace the cliché "quick as a wink" one of the alternatives I would come up with would be "in a Planck second." The people I took my Quantum Mechanics courses with at university would know that a Planck second is the fundamental unit of time, in the same way that one sock is the fundamental unit of lost laundry. You can't get any smaller than that.

While my cliché replacement works for me, it requires specialist knowledge to understand. It would be safer to assume your reader doesn't share any of your specialist knowledge or background. In my case, I need to come up with something that someone with a background in, for example, sociology could understand. Having shared a house with a sociologist, I know it's about as far away from my physics background as you can get while still remaining on this planet, with the possible exception of underwater basket weaving.

The reason clichés became clichés in the first place was because they were once new and fresh, startling and apt. So good that everyone started to use them. Everywhere. These days, they are old and familiar. People in the last century would look at the phrase "in two shakes of a lamb's tail" and recall what a lamb's tail looks like and how fast they can shake it. In our more industrialised lives, "faster than gossip" or "quicker than email" would be more appropriate.

If the brainstorming doesn't work, take a look around you. Think whether anything you see could evoke the right sentiment. "Fragile as a crystal vase" could come from a glance around the living room, or "she has a mind like an unmade bed" from the bedroom. What else does the moon look like besides green cheese or a bowl of milk? A spotlight, or a Frisbee at the top of it's arc, a bald man's head or a snowball, the back of a CD perhaps?

Replacing something good enough to stand the test of time is no pushover. It gives me butterflies just thinking about it...

Drabble of the Month

The theme for April is Computers, so here is this month's Drabble from Paul in England. It should be familiar to anyone who has watched Linux or Unix start up.

Going Multiuser...

The Drabble theme for May is Travel and for June is Vacations. Please keep those Drabbles coming in.

March contest update : In light of the late March T-zero, the deadline for the March contest has been extended from April 15th to April 30th.