Inauthentic Writing:
Cliché & Convenience

18} STOLEN TALES: A CLICHÉ ROSE IN
SPANISH HARLEM

A writer’s job is to write stories—not to steal or borrow them and, with a coat of fresh paint, pawn them off as original.

That should be obvious, but it’s not always completely clear. Our own private thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and fantasies are inevitably colored by what Jung called the collective unconscious— the vast, reservoir-like body of shared human experiences, of myths, symbols, and legends.

Take this story set in Spanish Harlem, where Emilio Bermudez, a rookie fresh from the police academy, stakes out a bodega with his partner Joe. While on duty Emilio falls hard for Dulce, the lovely sister of the drug-dealing bodega owner.

Need I fill in the rest? In the climactic drug bust, Joe sees Dulce reach for a “weapon” and fires. The bullet goes straight through her heart. Dulce had been reaching innocently for the love note Emilio had sent her, and she dies in Emilio’s arms.

If these characters and their situation seem familiar, they are. We’ve all seen similar stories a hundred times.

Most sensational subjects have been treated to death. Result: a minefield of clichés. And, as Martin Amis tells us, “All good writing is a war against cliché.” The story’s problems might be partially redeemed by crisp dialogue, vivid descriptions, and an impeccable edgy style—but the plain fact is, they shouldn’t be solved. This clichéd rose is wilted down to its thorns.

Steer clear of tired plots and you, your characters, and your readers will avoid all kinds of heartache.

19} THE LURE OF THE SENSATIONAL: ONE
FLEW OUT OF THE CUCKOO’S NEST

For beginning and even experienced writers, the temptation to choose intrinsically dramatic subjects is hard to resist. Drug deals and busts gone wrong, kidnapping, abortion, car crashes, murder, madness, rape, war—with such sensational raw material to work with, how can writers go wrong?

They can and they do.

A student of mine, Henry, turns in a story set in a mental hospital. He has described the hospital and its setting in painstaking detail, vividly rendering the ward’s “colorful” gallery of assorted patients.

Henry doesn’t realize that in choosing this situation he has bumbled into a minefield of clichés; he will need to avoid all the stereotypes of loony-bin lore coined by Ken Kesey in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and recycled in a myriad of TV shows and books.

Soon enough, we encounter a tyranical head psychiatrist— a male Nurse Ratched—and his intractable patient, a hapless schizophrenic named Ben (read: Billy Bibbit) whose brother, Warren, happens to be a resident shrink on the ward and the narrator of the story. Only after Ben hangs himself does heretofore passive Warren emerge from his catatonia to seek revenge, storming the tyrant nurse’s office and pumping him full of melodramatic lead.

I read Henry’s story with a mixture of sadness and horror— horror at seeing so much talent and effort wasted on a fundamentally flawed choice of subject matter. Not that you can’t set a story on a mental ward, or that you can’t tell stories about mental patients and the abuses they suffer at the hands of their keepers. But if you do so, you need to realize what you’re up against.

And what you’re up against is cliché.

20}PUT SCHIELE ON A LADDER:
ARTSY CLICHÉS

Every milieu has its clichés, its stock characters and stereotypes.

Another stereotype is that of the starving artist. Just once, I’d like to read about a successful artist—a Thomas Kincaid or a Peter Max—grinding out schlock art while raking in millions. Or just a talented, hard-working painter, supplementing his small income from gallery sales through teaching, grants, and fellowships.

This, after all, is the reality for most professional fine artists.

Instead we get Giorgio, the Italian gigolo-slash-genius, in his Soho loft, seducing and/or being seduced by his models.⁹ Or a consumptive artist in his frigid garret, tearing up his masterpieces to feed to the wood stove while the landlord pounds on his bolted door. Or the genius at work in the French countryside, lashed by the mistral winds, gripping his easel while chewing the paint from his brushes. These clichés owe much to (respectively) La Boheme and Lust for Life (the movie version of Irving Stone’s novel about van Gogh, starring a clench-toothed, fiery-eyed Kirk Douglas).

A former painter myself, I have limited tolerance for these clichés. Even poor Vincent, that most depraved and deprived of artists, fails to live up to the image. The letters he wrote to his brother Theo and others show how sane this “madman” was. True, he often went hungry, and he suffered from incapacitating seizures. But the cartoon of the foaming madman does him no justice.

But the real problem with clichés is that they deprive us of genuine details, which, though less sensational, are both more convincing and more interesting. A deeper look into the life of any artist will reveal facts that have it over all clichés.

Take a look, for a moment, at the life of Egon Schiele, another “depraved” artist. The biographical facts of Schiele’s life are much more interesting than the chestnuts. In his late teens he was already a student in the Vienna Academy. At nineteen he moved into his own studio in Kurzbauergasse. At twenty he had his first paintings exhibited at the International Art Show in Vienna. Soon afterwards he moved in with his model, a woman named Wally Neuzil who was not yet sixteen, and was charged with breach of moral code. He began sketching nudes around 1910. Most were done not at an easel, but on a ladder, with an “eagle’s eye” view of his subjects.

The truth is the best weapon we have for authenticity and against cliché: whether it’s the literal truth or the truth of imagination doesn’t matter.

Put your fictional artists on ladders and readers will not only get more convincing, authentic descriptions, but more moving ones.

21} HOW NOT TO BORE: IMITATION STORIES
& PRACTICING SINCERITY

When we produce stories that are derivative, we’re not being honest with ourselves. We’re borrowing someone else’s aesthetics and selling them as our own.

In choosing intrinsically sensational subjects writers think they’re getting a free—or a cheap—ride. But as with all things in life, you tend to get what you pay for. The best way to avoid cliché is to practice sincerity. “Sincerity,” wrote Borges, “isn’t a moral choice, but an aesthetic one.”

If we’ve come by sensational material honestly, through our own personal experience or imagination, we may rightly claim it as our own. Otherwise, we’d best steer clear. Our stories should be stories that only we can tell, as only we can tell it.

22}BORE ME STIFF, I DARE YOU:
A FAVORITE EXERCISE

I ask my students to write two pieces, one at a time, each about a minute long. Piece #1 should rivet the reader; Piece #2 should bore the reader stiff. Each student reads both pieces out loud. They have one minute either to bore the class silly or to draw us to the edges of our seats. A show of hands afterwards decides which of the two pieces is the more interesting.

Here are opening paragraphs from one student’s two pieces. I leave it to you to guess which is which.

1. Percy Battenberg strained against the force of the yacht’s wheel, struggling to keep Contessa on course for Yarmouth. The squall had come up quickly and the forty-four-foot sloop careened off the thick, fast-moving, and relentlessly towering swells. Over and over again the wind pushed her up a wave’s backside where she paused at the crest as though to enjoy the view, her three tons momentarily weightless, before pitching violently forward and surfing out of control down the wave’s face, burying her bow into the next swell and beginning the process again.

2. Having gotten off the plane, I proceeded down a series of fluorescent-lit, gray-carpeted passageways into the terminal. Airports have always intimidated me. Since I had no idea how to get to baggage claim, I followed some fellow passengers from my flight—an elderly couple—who seemed to know what they were doing. I really had to go to the bathroom, and knowing the trip into the city was probably going to take a while was tempted to duck into the first restroom I saw, but I didn’t want to risk losing my elderly guides and not finding my way to baggage claim. But then, I thought, if I go to the bathroom after baggage claim, I’ll have to carry all my bags into the stall. That could get a little tight, and airport bathrooms aren’t always clean. Damn, I should have gone back there, on the plane, and to hell with the seat belt sign.

If you guessed that Piece #1 was supposed to be riveting, while Piece #2 was meant to bore us silly, you’re right. But as measured by a hand vote after each piece was read out loud, the results were contradictory.

To the majority of students (and to their teacher), Piece #1 was trite from the start. Beyond the dropping of a name, there are no characters in it, no human beings to relate to, just a squall of nautical terms, with the sloop as protagonist. After the first paragraph I had to force myself to keep listening.

Piece #2 presents us with a recognizably human character in a situation that most of us can relate to; it kept me and others engaged. Riveting? Hardly. But relatively authentic.

Whenever I’ve done this experiment, in almost every instance the result is the same: The “riveting” piece bores, while the “boring” piece holds interest. There are several reasons for this. In their effort to grip us, beginning writers tend to rush: They equate their own adrenaline with that of the reader. Conversely, when trying to bore, the same writers take their time; they don’t hesitate to lavish 250 words on the subject of a wall of white paint drying. And— to their consternation—the result mesmerizes. At any rate it holds our attention.

But far worse than rushing, in trying to interest us, most writers abandon sincerity, and with it authenticity. They choose sensational subjects on the basis of little personal knowledge and no genuine emotional investment. They do so on the assumption that their own stories aren’t interesting enough, that what they have to offer us as writers isn’t suitably “sensational.” In fact, every human being is in some way unique, and this uniqueness in itself makes us each “sensational,” in our own ways.

In pretending to be anyone other than themselves, writers sacrifice the very thing we most crave from them: authenticity.

23} RESCUING STORIES FROM
CIRCUMSTANTIAL CLICHÉ

As the moth is attracted to flame, less-than-vigilant writers are attracted to the bright light of intrinsically dramatic situations, where the drama is preassembled, ready to use—convenient.

We’re drawn to clichés because they’re convenient. And convenience for writers—convenient plots, convenient characters, convenient coincidences, convenient settings or situations or strings of words—almost always spells doom.

A writer sets her story in an abortion clinic. What are the expectations raised by such a setting? To the extent that those expectations are met head-on, her story fails. It descends into cliché and denies the reader an authentic experience.

One expects (for instance) that a young woman will face an excruciating choice under great pressure. She may or may not be accompanied by the man or boy who put her in this position; he may be callous or callow, or he may be sensitive and confused. The drama may occur on the way to Planned Parenthood, or on the way home, but the implied setting is still the clinic itself.

What will the author do to rescue that drama from our expectations, from cliché?

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway rescues his abortion story by doing away with the setting. Instead of locating his story in the abortion clinic, he sets it in the station where the man and woman await the train that will take her to the city and (as we infer, since abortion is never mentioned) to the clinic.

Hemingway’s story of an abortion was powerful then because no one had previously dared to raise the subject. It remains powerful today because Papa avoided the obvious, and in so doing rescued his story from a cliché before the cliché had even been coined.

In “Miserere,” one of seven mercilessly authentic stories gathered in Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone, a widowed librarian salvages aborted fetuses from clinic dumpsters in order to have them blessed for burial.

Stone avoids the obligatory abortion clinic setting, as well as the distraught patient and her callous and/or contrite boyfriend. Stone steers clear of such well-trodden territory to give us a story that reawakens our senses to a subject that has in and of itself become a cliché.

24}SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES CLICHÉS:
AN IMITATION BOXING STORY

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.”

Either your chosen subject plunges you into the imagination’s deeper waters, or your story will probably drift into one of two shallow waterways:

(a) the autobiographical estuary, in which you write strictly about characters and events from your own life,

or

(b) the brackish bay of stereotype and cliché.

A student’s story about a boxer drifts into the second waterway, recycling familiar material from old boxing movies: On the Waterfront, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Rocky I, II, III, etc.

That the boxer-protagonist happens to be female doesn’t rescue the story, especially now that female boxing stories have already entered the Kingdom of Cliché.

The way to rescue this and other clichés may lie in exploring those parts of the story that don’t belong firmly to the cliché. When she’s not boxing, what is our female pugilist doing? Does she have friends, family, children? Maybe she’s boxing to put her son or daughter (or herself) through college, or to support her stroke-victim father? Or maybe she’s doing what she’s doing to regain her confidence and strength after losing her husband, or after a serious illness?

By investing our characters with concerns and struggles that point away from the hackneyed and sensational and toward the earthier dramas of “ordinary” existence, by taking the most trite elements of our stories out of the foreground and putting them in the background, we begin to lift them out of cliché.