: Re: How To Avoid Using Cliches In Storylines? How is it possible to avoid cliches in storylines that you are writing? Obviously, there are external sources of influences as you read more and more.

@Becky328

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Don't try to avoid clichés just for the sake of avoiding them - no matter how original you think your idea is, some reader somewhere will see it coming from a mile away. Instead, try to make people give a darn.

My favourite example of this is in video game design: you can have a character X asking players deliver an item Y to location Z. The player may initially go "yawn, it's a bloody FedEx quest." There's two major schools of design here: Make the video game full of boring delivery quests where nothing of interest happens (you get points while having boring old time! Whee!) or make a few delivery quests where interesting things take place, and the player can see that you didn't just rev up the automatic quest generation wizard built in the game editor. It's still a FedEx quest, but people actually had fun playing it, so they won't really complain. Mission accomplished.

So, if your fascinating plotline is mercilessly picked apart by nitpickers in TVTropes, that's not a bad thing - it happens to everyone and every story. The bad thing is when all of the readers yawn in unison and join the aforementioned TVTropes nitpickery because they know all about your story without even reading it.

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