IV. Avoid Cliches Like The Plague Unless You Are In Star Wars

Star Wars coined the clichés. What's our excuse?

I've mentioned before that description is good so long as it's interesting. One way to help it be original is to avoid any clichés whatsoever. Instead of "He was as blind as a bat." you could try "His vision with his glasses was 20-60. Without the glasses, he couldn't even read the E on the sight chart. In fact, he was so adept at not reading the E that on his last doctor's visit, he had managed to turn that E it into an F. It had jolted him – hazy and black and Arial Bold, leering from its station beside the window. He had only ever gotten an F once, in a P.E. class, but the memory was strong."

You see how by NOT using clichés, you can a) make the writing more interesting and b) find out things about your character that you'd never even have imagined? I honestly had no idea where I was going just now – I started writing, trying to use as few clichés as possible, and that happened.

Also, trying to invent your own similes is wicked fun. "His face was as hard and lumpy as a potato, and his hands looked as though they had survived a nasty encounter with the Giant Snowman." J.K. Rowling has some fabulously amusing similes in Harry Potter. I think my favorite would have to be "She's as nutty as squirrel poo," from the seventh book. I'm not sure she actually coined the phrase herself, but it gives me the giggles.

Back to clichés. This cliché-avoidance business goes for characters and plots too. Don't make the heroine be a princess named Raven who is skinny and beautiful and loves fencing and archery and longs to be a boy and go on adventures and crap. Don't make the hero be a perfect guy with rippling pecs who will give his life and his rippling pecs to save his lady love. Make your sorcerers misunderstood (but not too misunderstood, since that's a cliché in its own right). Avoid villains with anime-villain-laugh. Give the bad guy at least one brain cell. I guess the main rule here is, if your characters act exactly like characters out of a soppy manga series or a chick-flick, that's probably a bad thing.