: Re: What to do with cliched metaphors? Example from my own writing: "Please take care of yourself," she replied. "Health is the most important thing in life, remember that." "I know,

@Courtney562

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If you use a canned phrase or a well-known simile, such as "like speaking different languages", then you're evoking for a reader a situation that they are familiar with, and appealing to their own understanding of such situations that they've described (or seen described) in those terms.

It's not always a bad thing, but it's also not putting any novel ideas in the mouth of your narrator. In effect it's routine presentation of information about the scene and his reaction to it. If that's what you want to do, then do it, but if it's not what you want to do then do something different. Don't try to do the same routine thing in unexpected language.

Tweaking the known phrase by substituting "dialect" for "language" does nothing for you. At best the reader doesn't notice, at worst they wonder why you didn't just say the usual thing. Since there's no good reason, it's just less of an exaggeration if taken literally, they conclude that you're stretching your vocabulary to no purpose.

Changing the metaphor allows your narrator to express a different, and less familiar, thought. OK, so shouting from different shores isn't completely original either, but if what you want is to present a different perspective on a well-known situation (in this case one of failure to communicate and by extension failure to connect) then there's no shortcut to it, you have to actually come up with a fresh thought on the subject!

If you just want to communicate the facts on the ground, but you feel that the usual idiom is clichéed, then go more literal rather than reaching for a different metaphor: "It felt as if she could never understand me".

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