Pushing past Clichés

I've been writing about elevating the level of your writing, making any piece of writing more literary. One thing that can kill a piece of writing for the reader faster than most other things is to fill it full of clichés.  It doesn't matter if those clichés are characters everyone has seen hundreds of times before, subplots that seem lifted from a movie, or even turns of phrase people have read in every other tired piece of writing.  People want fresh writing, fresh characters, and fresh plotlines.  If your writing feels like every other fantasy novel, every other poem, every other anything they've read, your piece is dead in the water.  In other words, avoid clichés like the plague [pardon the clichés].  

When most people go to write, what they have to draw on is the standard list of phrases, characters, plotlines.  Good writers don't stop there.  You don't have to do this with draft one.  As the quotation from the writers' movie "Finding Forrester" goes, "You write your first draft with your heart, and you rewrite with your head."  When you write the first draft, you can fill your piece with whatever clichés come to mind first.   But when you go to rewrite, pinpoint the clichés.  Find them one by one and push past your initial impulses.

How can you do that?  One method is by brainstorming.  Say you've written a draft [or simply have first thoughts and some basic notes] in which your language is riddled with clichés.  Find synonyms.  Make nouns into verbs and vice versa.  Search for the perfect metaphors and similes.  Find a way to make the language fresh.  

Say you've done some preliminary work and found your main characters to be so familiar as to be dull.  Say he's a weak nerd who is bullied by a big kid.  You say to yourself, "I've lost count of the times I've read this story before."  So how can you make your particular nerd special?  How can your bully become something fresh and new?  You say to yourself, "Okay, how about I make the bully a super genius and the main kid an impish girl."  That starts to be a little different.  But you don't have to stop there, either.  Push it further until you've found something not just fresh but with more potential for drama.  You could change genres if you're at an early enough point to do so.  Would the bully and nerd be more interesting in space?  In a magical land?  Would it work in the future?  Or in a gothic horror story?

Whether or not you change your genre, it will be critical to spend more time developing the individual characters.  You could write the character's journal.  You could simply write more, draw more, plan more.  You could do a character interview in which you ask your character a series of questions that shed more light on him/her.

Do whatever it takes to turn your character, your story, your words into something new.  Don't settle for the first thing that comes to mind.