: Re: Help! I have no 'cheese-meter'! Over the past few years, it has come to my attention that I lack the ability to identify cheese. And by cheese, I mean cheesy things in movies/books. I simply

@Phylliss352

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For someone who doesn't understand cheese, the easiest gauge is probably to ask yourself the following:

"Why is this happening?"

If you can answer this question from every angle (logic, science, plot, plot development) then it probably won't come off as incredibly cheesy, even if it's an overused trope.
For example, amnesia is often overused, and is usually cheesy when it happens.

Ask yourself why a character got amnesia:

Science: "Because he got hit on the head." -- Iffy, because it is highly improbable for someone to get amnesia from a random head injury

Logic: "Another character didn't like him and attacked him." -- This may be true, but it's a reason for him to get injured, not for him to get amnesia.

Plot: "Because I wanted him to forget the female character to create conflict" -- And this is the crux of the problem. This didn't happen because it made sense in the context of your characters and your story, it happened because you pulled it out of nowhere and used it as a plot device to keep your characters at odds with one another.

Amnesia can, occasionally, make sense in the context of the story. For example, if your story centered around a pair of scientists that successfully transferred someone's consciousness into a computer, however, the memories didn't transfer over correctly. In this story, one could explore not only whether the memories make the person, but whether the "soul" actually got transmitted into the computer. The character would be fretting over whether or not they died.

Cheese will happen. Tropes will happen.

But a good writer can select a trope and craft it so well that there isn't the faintest smell of cheese.

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