Why We Love Clichés and Struggle to Avoid Them

The challenge of originality, and an interview with author and Art Director Julie Metz

As a publisher, I spend my time in a sea of clichés. Writers write clichés. Authors are drawn to images that are cliché. Time is spent in our weekly cover meetings contemplating when to allow a cliché and when to quash it. Clichés abound to a degree that they cannot be stopped or drown out altogether. So, we work to keep them at bay, or to find fresh ways to present the overly familiar.

Clichés are everywhere in our self-expression, ideas, metaphors, language, themes, and visuals. You know one when you see one because you’ve seen it before—the car driving off into the sunset, the lone person standing on a trail in the forest, looking contemplative, the image of a heart being held in cupped palms.

I have more tolerance for visual clichés than written ones, maybe because when it comes to images—for covers, for slide decks, for social media memes, for blog posts—we have to use what we can find. Also, visual clichés can be appealing. I’ve used flying books and pages bent to form the curve of a heart in my marketing materials for classes I teach.

Still, I’m surprised by how many authors on our lists push for or even insist on clichés when it comes to their covers. Common images we see in those memos include birds in flight, butterflies, hearts, dandelions, hummingbirds, and shooting stars. We’ve accommodated these requests over the years, in part because sometimes we’ve taken otherwise-cliché images and done something creative or distinct.

In a recent cover meeting, She Writes Press/SparkPress Art Director Julie Metz made me laugh when she told me, “It’s not their fault that they’ve been manipulated by clichés.” We’d fallen down the heart rabbithole again. Hearts are such a common request from authors that we  now have a moratorium on heart covers. Only one author per season is allowed a heart cover, which has pushed our design team to create some pretty cool and unique ideas over the years:

I’ve been more mindful of clichés lately because I’m writing my own memoir. I see how easy it is for the mind to gravitate toward well-worn metaphors, ideas, symbols, and phrases. It takes work to steer away from clichés. Julie suggested this is because we’re assaulted by clichés in our everyday life. Consider if you’ve ever written that you were like a kid in a candy store or a kid on Christmas morning to describe your excitement over something; or if you’ve ever written that something happened in the blink of an eye, or that you or a character was walking on air. The list of clichés goes on ad infinitum, which is why they’re so hard to avoid.

Still, we must try. If we want our writing—and our covers—to be fresh, creative, and evocative, and we do, then efforting toward originality of self-expression is its own reward.

As we chatted on about clichés (see me actively acknowledge but steer clear of “as the bane of our design existence”), I asked Julie if I could pose a few interview questions to her for this post. (Julie authors the Substack, “Consider the Spider,” and I hope you’ll check it out and sign up.)

Brooke: Why do you think writers/authors are so drawn to clichés? 
Julie: Clichés permeate our culture at all levels, and this manipulative language and imagery has been spoonfed to us since birth. Every rom-com, sit-com, and too many other movies and TV shows we’ve ever seen, as well many books, employ familiar plots, beats, and visuals. The first step is to understand that we are all vulnerable. Clichés work because they are everywhere and they are everywhere because they work. They persuade us to buy things we don’t need, they work on our emotions. However, if you want to create a truly original piece of writing, it’s important to avoid the overused image and strive for something unexpected.

Brooke: Why, as an Art Director, do you think it’s important to avoid clichés? 
Julie: If we want to present a book list that feels fresh and challenging and relevant, we need to move away from visual clichés or—and this can be done!—we need to find a way to twist a cliché so that it delivers an unexpected message. Some seasons back we worked on a book titled Beautiful Affliction (see photo montage above), a memoir about a woman with heart disease. I found an image of a dressmaker’s mannequin with a red cloth heart pinned onto it. There was something so poignant to me about this image, a reminder that we are all living in human bodies with imperfections, and that we all experience physical suffering. There was nothing treacly about this heart image. A great memoir tells a unique human story with a universal message. Even those of us without this particular illness can relate to the author’s struggle to find healing. So we went with this image and it really worked. As you know, I only allow our design team one heart per season. We should never use an image that has become a cliché unless we can find a way to make it a fresh idea.

Brooke: How can we be more aware of the ways in which clichés are infiltrating our creativity?
Julie: Few of us are immune. I too succumb to Instagram advertising! But my goal is to look at advertising that is clearly being aimed at me and think about the visual tropes the company is using to try to get me to pay for their product or service. In writing and thinking about cover imagery, the places where we most often see clichés are in titles that rely on familiar (and overused) expressions and imagery. In creating a title, it’s useful to search your idea on Amazon to see if you’ve inadvertently slipped into a cliché. As designers, we are working with your words, so the fight against a hackneyed cliché begins there. “Question Authority” and “Think Outside the Box” are two cliché expressions that are actually useful here. Make sure that the image you have in your mind for your cover is truly original and arresting. If it surprises and startles you, you might be on to something. 

Brooke: What’s the most bothersome of all the clichés? 
Julie: OMG, where to begin? Sunsets, moons, shooting stars, dandelion seeds blowing in the wind, and . . . hearts in all forms. However, as mentioned above, there are ways to twist a cliché. 

I appreciate that twice Julie mentions the prospect of twisting the cliché, since something that’s  cliché in one context might be deeply meaningful and resonant in another. Clichés do appeal to our senses, which is why we like them. When reading online about clichés, I found this tidbit on a blog post about advertising clichés: “French poet Gérard de Nerval said, ‘The first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet. The second, an imbecile.’”

Harsh? Maybe. But a good reminder to push ourselves to come up with fresh descriptions and creative ways of articulating or messaging our ideas. Delight your readers with your aesthetic. If you feel stale in your approach, start carrying a notebook around and recording things that surprise you. It seems to me we lose originality when we stop being curious. I encourage anyone working to combat clichés to listen to my recent podcast featuring Janet Fitch on the senses. She has many good ideas for ways to think about description. She bemoans that we’ve become impoverished in our language, and perhaps we have. One way to ward off impoverishment is to fill your well. Record ideas, phrases, and snippets of language that delight you. Listen for uniqueness of expression. Pay attention to original characters in the world. What are they doing and saying and wearing? How are they acting? Avoid clichés by practicing the art of noticing what you find original.