Is Romance cliché?
In a recent wonderful post by Tessa Dare about love and fairy tales, she made a claim that her own work was full of clichéd phrases. I'm here to dispute that. Oh, yes, the occasional cliché can be found in her work. But it is infrequent and deliberately placed.
Hence the inspiration for this blog. Romance writers are not just about clichéd phrases. Witness the opening sentence of Kathleen Woodiwiss's "clichéd" book, The Flame and the Flower:
Somewhere in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings, but here in the English countryside it plodded slowly, painfully, as if it trod the rutted road that stretched across the moors on blistered feet. Clichéd phrase or fresh writing? I call it fresh.
Here's one of my favorite fresh phrases from one of Tessa Dare's works :
His hand darted out, and he caught the fluttering scrap of white effortlessly, as though it were a dove trained to fly to his hand.
From Courtney Milan:
He drove into her like hard rain falling on a river.
From my own work:
The sound of his name tumbled from her lips like a coin into a well, a golden weight laden with wishes that plummeted straight to his core.
As romance writers I believe we must work even harder than "literary" folks to write fresh. After all, everyone expects us to fall short.
Here are some examples of clichés I'm sorry to say were in my manuscript and had to be cut:
Her mouth formed a perfect "O".
If this was a dream, she didn't want to wake up.
But I still keep a rare cliché when it suits me. Check out the first page of Twist of Fate and you'll be hearing about the hero's "sun-bronzed chest", which replaced "muscled chest", which was just too too cliché for me. Okay, maybe it's the same difference. But Christian's sun-bronzed chest stays until an editor (cross your legs) makes me cut it.
I notice Kathleen Woodiwiss does give her heroine blue eyes the color of sapphires, but it's such a beautiful book, I'm okay with that.
Here's your challenge: Tell us a fresh phrase from your own work, or your cp's work, or an admired author's work, or all of the above. Show us how wonderful romance can be when it's done well. Then fess up. Tell us a cliché you cut from your own work if you dare. :-)
