The clichés of wattpad

G. Avoiding cliché themes

--  Avoid stolen or borrowed tails.

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. Then, try to sugar coat them and make them yours.

·     --   Steer clear of tired plot.

Don’t make your characters have all kinds of heartache. And this doesn’t mean they can’t have something tragic happen; they should, just don’t have your character constantly have issues.

·        --Resist The Lure of the Sensational

For beginning writers it is very hard to resist the temptation of drug deals and busts gone wrong, kidnapping, abortion, car crashes, murder, madness, rape, war with such sensational raw material to work with, how can writers go wrong?

 Well they can and they do.

A writer who chooses to set his/her story in a mental hospital, for instance, may bumble into a minefield of clichés. He will need to avoid all of the loony-bin stereotypes you see on TV shows and in books.

Not that you can’t set a story on a mental ward, or that you can’t tell stories about mental patients and the abuses they suffer at the hands of their keepers. But if you do so, you need to realize what you’re up against.

And what you’re up against is cliché.

·      --  Tell the Story Only You Can Tell

The best way to avoid cliché is to practice sincerity. If we’ve come by sensational material honestly, through our own personal experience or imagination, we may rightly claim it as our own. Otherwise, we’d best steer clear. Our stories should be stories that only we can tell, as only we can tell them.

·       -- Keep it Real by Taking it Slow

Rushing, in trying to interest us is bad, most writers abandon sincerity and, with it, authenticity. They choose sensational subjects on the basis of little personal knowledge and no genuine emotional investment. They do this on the assumption that their own stories aren’t interesting enough, that what they have to offer isn’t suitably “sensational.” In fact, every human is in some way unique, and this in itself makes us each “sensational” in our own ways.