To be avoided like the plague?

All writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart.

Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche

Martin Amis

Ben Blatt points out in his book Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve that all writers, at least all the writers he has surveyed, use cliches. As I mentioned last time, bestselling author James Patterson uses the most on Blatt's list (160 cliches per 100,000 words), while Jane Austen uses the fewest (just 45). This might lead you to assume that the best writers depend less on the cliche than lesser authors. To some extent this is true. Keeping Austen company at her end of the list are the likes of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. Yet there are also some pretty fair writers keeping Patterson company: Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon and George Orwell, for example.

Writes Blatt, "Of all Pulitzer Prize winners between 2000 and 2016, the median cliche rate is 85 per 1000,000. If we look at the top ten bestselling books per year between 2000 and 2016 according to Publishers Weekly, the median cliche rate is 118 -- almost 40% higher." So maybe our very best writers do use fewer cliches than other writers, and let us hope so, but they do use some. Is their work weakened by the inclusion of these cliches, as Martin Amis would seem to suggest? Not necessarily. Sometimes a cliche can be forgivable, justified or even a deliberate artistic choice.

Consider Vonnegut as an example. One reason he is on the high end of cliche usage is his repetition of certain phrases like "and so it goes" in his novels. Almost every novel he wrote has a repeated phrase like that, and the repetition adds to the artistry of the novels, or so we could argue.

Sometimes novelists have characters who, for the sake of realism, speak in cliches. Real people do use cliches in their speech, and such speech should be reflected in fiction about supposedly real people.

Not all cliches are created equal. There are some like "black as pitch," a favorite phrase used by George R.R. Martin, or "dead of night," often used by J.K. Rowling, that we have all heard too often. Good writers should be able to avoid them. Yet other phrases strike me as less serious infractions. Take "the last straw," a favorite of Salman Rushdie, or "sooner or later," one used by Faulkner. They too are often heard, but one reason they are so often used is that they are so useful. Each expresses in three words an idea that might take several more words to say in original language that might not be as effective. Some cliches are phrases that act as words, quickly and clearly conveying ideas when other, more original phrases used to say the same thing might be confusing and complicated. Sometimes a worn cliche can be the best alternative.

When I reviewed The Message, Eugene Peterson's translation of the Bible in contemporary English, several years ago, I called it a collection of cliches. Here is how Peterson translates some verses in the 12th chapter of Hebrews: "So don't sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet! Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle. Help each other out. And run for it!" Try counting all the cliches in those lines.

And yet at the churches I attend in both Ohio and Florida, The Message is the most commonly used Bible translation in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and I may be the only one in the congregation who feels uneasy about it. Like them or not, cliches are useful for conveying meaning. And sometimes that means more than art.