Cringeworthy Clichés
Building on my advice about short story endings yesterday, comes another tip about short story writing and that’s to watch your use of clichés.
Over-used clichés such as, ‘Her skin was as white as snow’, ‘He looked outside and saw it was raining cats and dogs’ and ‘She looked as light as a feather’ will have a short story editor cringing and putting your work on the reject pile.
It’s so easy for those cliches to slip into our writing; cliches are often like best friends, we know them so well, and so we can’t help but write them! Therefore, it’s good to step back and to look at our writing critically.
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I use them very rarely, although when I do, I do to elicit an attitude from a character in a story. My blog entry of my conversation with my dog is an example. I tend to shove as many ideas into as few words as I can. It makes people think much more than describing everything to the smallest atom.
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This is a good point; they can work well if they’re something a particular character would us. Thank you for the comment 🙂
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Esther Chilton 
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