22.10 Cliche Removal

Cliche removal is the editing practice of identifying overused expressions, images, and descriptive phrases that have become so familiar through repeated use across many works that they no longer produce a vivid or specific effect in a reader's mind, and replacing them with fresher, more precise language suited to the particular scene, character, or moment in which they appear.

Why Cliches Weaken Prose

A cliche functions as a kind of shorthand: because a phrase such as "her heart pounded," "time stood still," or "a chill ran down his spine" has been encountered so many times before, in so many different contexts, a reader recognizes it instantly without needing to form a fresh mental image. This is precisely the problem. The phrase communicates that an emotion or sensation is occurring in a general category — fear, surprise, tension — without conveying anything specific to this character, in this moment, in this story. Where fresh, specific language forces a reader to briefly construct a new image or sensation, a cliche allows the reader to skim past the moment on autopilot, recognizing the emotional category being signaled without actually experiencing it freshly.

Categories of Cliche

Stock descriptive phrases. Expressions such as "eyes like the ocean," "silence as thick as fog," or "a stab of pain" have been used so extensively across so many works that they arrive at the reader pre-worn, carrying an association with countless other books rather than with the specific one being read.

Cliched physical reactions to emotion. Descriptions of a character's body responding to strong feeling — "her breath caught," "his blood ran cold," "a lump formed in her throat" — are used so frequently as shorthand for internal states that they have become a kind of default vocabulary for emotion in fiction, often reached for automatically during drafting precisely because they require no fresh observation of the specific character or moment.

Cliched scene-setting. Descriptions of settings using standard, expected imagery — a stormy night signaling danger, a full moon signaling the uncanny, a crackling fireplace signaling coziness — rely on established genre associations rather than on the writer's direct observation of the particular setting being described, producing atmosphere that feels imported rather than built from the scene's specific details.

Cliched phrasing and idiom. Common turns of phrase such as "at the end of the day," "in the blink of an eye," or "like a deer in headlights" are so worn from everyday use, not only in fiction, that they read as filler even when technically accurate, contributing no distinctive voice or texture to the sentence.

Cliched plot devices and character types. Beyond the level of individual phrases, cliche can also operate at the level of larger story elements — a stock character type, a predictable plot turn — though this broader category is generally addressed during structural revision rather than during the line-level cliche removal that targets specific wording.

Techniques for Identifying Cliches

Testing for prior encounter. A useful check for whether a phrase is a cliche is whether it feels instantly, effortlessly familiar — if a description could have been lifted from many other books without anyone noticing, it is likely functioning as a cliche rather than as language specific to the manuscript at hand.

Reading with suspicion toward automatic phrasing. Cliches are often the first phrase that comes to mind precisely because they are so well-worn, which means that language written quickly, without pause, during a first draft is disproportionately likely to contain them; a deliberate slowdown during editing, questioning phrases that arrived without conscious effort, helps surface them for review.

Cross-referencing personal habitual phrases. Because writers often reach for the same handful of cliches repeatedly across their own work, maintaining awareness of one's own recurring cliched phrases — informed by prior manuscripts or editor feedback — allows a more targeted search during a dedicated editing pass.

Replacing a Cliche

Replacing a cliche is not simply a matter of finding a synonym for the worn phrase; a synonym-level substitution often produces a phrase that is merely unfamiliar rather than genuinely more vivid or accurate. Effective replacement instead returns to the specific character, setting, or moment being described and asks what is actually, concretely true about it — not what fear or tension in general looks like, but what this particular character's body or attention does under this specific pressure. The result is typically a more particular, more sensory image grounded in the scene's specific details rather than a general descriptor borrowed from a shared cultural stock of emotional shorthand.

Balancing Cliche Removal with Readability

Not every familiar phrase requires replacement. Some conventional expressions function as functional, low-attention connective language rather than as an attempt at vivid imagery, and rewriting every ordinary phrase in pursuit of originality can produce prose that feels strained or overwritten, drawing attention to its own effort rather than serving the story. Cliche removal is generally applied with the most weight given to moments of emotional or descriptive significance — where a fresh, specific image matters most to the reader's experience — rather than uniformly across every sentence in a manuscript.