: Re: Is it possible to combine clichés/tropes to make it not a cliché? I have read a couple romance books at most and so don’t claim to have very much experience with romance and clichés.

@Annie587

I don't think you make a cliche cease to be a cliche by combining it with another cliche.

The real way to make a cliche cease to be a cliche is to do it well. Shifting genres (because I don't read much romance -- see my profile where I checked the box "male" :-), "young man goes on a quest and fights evil villains and monsters" is as cliche as it gets. Yet that describes the plot of "Star Wars", and "Star Wars" is hugely popular to this day. Oh, a romance example that comes to mind: "couple alternates between being passionately in love and constant bickering" is another standard cliche, but that's the plot of "Gone With the Wind" which routinely shows up on lists of the greatest movies of all times. (Admittedly, it does break the cliche in that they don't live happily ever after in the end.)

If you are overly simplistic about it, you could say that 99% of fiction is a cliche plot. "Couple meet and go through various trials and fall in love", "hero sets out on a quest", "brilliant detective solves a crime", etc. I'm sure I could come up with a dozen or so such generic descriptions of a plot that would cover almost every story ever written. What distinguishes good fiction from bad is not that good fiction has some totally original basic plot idea that no one ever thought of before, but rather that good fiction does it well.

You could say that "Romeo and Juliet" is "just another story about two young people who fall in love and then face problems that keep them apart". But that would be a very shallow description. Of course there are plenty of stories that use a similar plot that are totally uncreative and boring.

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