By: |
It’s not enough to love our story ideas. We need to weigh their suitability as subjects for fiction, and then figure out how to go about making use of them. This means steering clear of cliché and its sappy cousin—melodrama. Here are 10 tips to help you do just that.
(Note: This article is about cliched themes, not phrases. If you want to learn about cliche phrases that all writers should avoid, check out these cliche examples).
Avoid Stolen or Borrowed Tales
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 psychiatrist Carl Jung called the collective unconscious—the vast, reservoir-like body of shared human experiences and of myths, symbols and legends See More . . .