I still consider myself very new to the whole fantasy genre and even newbier to the young adult world since it just sprang itself upon me one day. With that being said, I am blissfully unaware of overused cliches in both genres and ignorant of them all at the same time. I don’t risk too much “influencing” at this point since I haven’t read much of either. No chance of subconscious story inserting there. But I also don’t really know the trends of the market, what’s been seen too many times and what I should spin to make it original. When I say, ‘of course I think my work is original, I haven’t read anything like it,’ well duh. I haven’t because I don’t even need to broach the toes to count the novels I have.
So, when I read the young adult top 25 list of overused cliches, I was pretty much free and clear until I got to number two: best friends with red hair. Figures, right? I can’t do one of the lesser used cliches, I need to go for the big guns right off the bat. Of course it was purely coincidental but I certainly did a *headdesk* when I saw that. Although I think I might have violated number twenty-three: a token black friend amongst a group of white friends, usually female. While my South Fair guy is, well, a guy, I never thought of him as the “token” black guy, especially with other cultures already made known in the story. The thing is, with how malleable my story is already (the red-head has already been shunted into secondary character land pre-post), I wouldn’t be surprised if it morphed again (and again, and again . . .).
Of course, it can’t be said that any of those listed elements are particularly bad and will render your story automatically rejected, they’re just predominant and should you use one of those elements, make sure to put a nice little topsy turvey spin on it to make it stand out from the crowd. Considering Kristin’s post is relatively recent (not backlogged for two years like the rest I’ve been referencing), I want to say it’s still relevant to today’s market and it’s just something to be aware of.
It’s like with vampires; it’s not that no one wants to see any more blood-suckers in novels, it’s just that the character’s been rubbed raw from redundant overuse and it’s going to take a mighty spark of originality to get any interest in it.
The bottom line is to write whatever it is you want to write. Writing for the market is always a bad thing, especially with how quickly it can change. But being aware of the pitfalls and pot holes on the path to landing an agent (or publisher) are always good things to know.
Recently:
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Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under On Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Somebody just mentioned to me the other day the red haired friend thing. I hadn’t heard it before, so I guess I need to get up on my cliches, too!
I’ve never heard of the red haired best friend thing either.
I think that number 25 (Vegetarian teens with unsympathetic meat-eating parents) could be teens with unsympathetic parents. Eh, perhaps it was the fact that I had a very supportive mum that makes me just want to scream whenever the parents are stupidly unsympathetic/unsupportive to their kids.
Or maybe it’s just the stupid part.
And I got nailed with the eyebrows and the fingernail biting and the biting lips (though my characters never drew blood…they don’t like pain surprise surprise).
I think I avoided some of the cliches by simply not describing people’s appearance.
Though that might be just the lazy way out.
Thanks for the agent links, I’m bookmarking them for later reading when I want to pursue this.
Angela, we’ll start a cliche study group.
You’re welcome, Sonja! Ironically enough, I found out after I started reading the blogs that both Kristin Nelson and Rachel Vater both rep young adult and/or fantasy. Woohoo!
I’m not a big appearances describer either. Unless it’s relevant to what’s going on, or it’s being used as a means of recognizing someone, I don’t use it. I think basic fundamentals of what a character looks like is good enough and then let the reader make up the rest.