Archetype, Off-the-Peg or Thundering Cliché?

When is a character, a phrase or a situation a stereotype, and when is it a trope? And what should you do about it all?

Are your miners men, your nursery nurses women, your teenagers sulky, your middle-aged mothers kindly and your gay men camp? Do your Frenchwomen dress exquisitely, your Germans take things seriously, your Bermondsey youth rap and your librarians wear cardigans? Does your posh/sloany¹/county character say, ‘OK, yah!’, your Bermondsey youth say ‘Bro,’ and your salt-of-the-earth rural narrator think, ‘That’ll be grand, that will!’? Do you use phrases like salt-of-the-earth?

Are your characters and phrases the first version of that character that occurred to you? Is that a bad thing?

‘Yes, but—’ I know some of you are saying. ‘People just do fit their age, gender, class, nationality and so on! And they talk that way, too. It’s just normal!’ And it’s true… sort of. Indeed, if you enjoy a good huff and puff about political correctness gone mad, then no doubt your confirmation biases, reading my implication that writing in line with your perceived norms is Bad Writing, want to park what I’m saying under the banner of wokery and worship of the abnormal.

But that’s not what I’m saying: this post is about what’s going on with ready-made ideas, characters and language, and how to work with them to your writing’s advantage, not its detriment.

Photo by Supreme Vintage on Unsplash

What shall we call ideas and language which are already present in other people’s stories, books and images, and in the world before us, when we draw on for our own? In approximate order of your writing group’s likely reaction, from approval to disapproval, some of the labels might be:

• Archetype

• Trope

• Classic

• Received

• Conventional

• Stock

• Ready-made

• Off-the-peg/Ready-to-wear

• Standard-issue

• Secondhand

• Predigested

• Stereotype

• Cliché

Some of these labels are probably used more of phrases, and some more of characters and situations, but at the core of them is the same thing: here on the page is something reader and writer have met before.

What is the value of ready-made elements?

• Off-the-peg characters and language are easier for the reader to take on board because both denotation and connotation - the aspects of them that add up to their meaning for the reader - are ready-made: they’re already available in the reader’s mind, and can be built on. It’s efficient storytelling, if you like.

• Archetypes and classic versions of ideas and situations encapsulate and make symbolic something very real about the human condition, so they can easily get the reader tapping into something quite profound.

• Familiar forms and genres enable the reader to relax - they know how to read this - and thereby be open to the new and unexpected within the form. After all, no one ever blamed a sonnet or a victoria sponge for being a cliché.

• A story-world which had no elements already recognisable to the reader would be at best pointless - why read it if it has nothing to say (however disguisedly) about our human experience of life on this planet ? - and at worst incomprehensible. We have to work with our own and the reader’s existing experience.

• Pre-existing stuff can be comfortable and therefore comforting for the reader: Readers know what they want, and they get it.

• With minor characters you may not want to spend too much story-space in making it clear why this surprising person is here. (Though are you sure you have to explain it at all?)

• ‘Easy reading is hard writing’, the saying goes, and it’s true, so I’m absolutely not saying that easy reading is poor writing - only that it depends what is creating that ease.

What are the drawbacks of ready-made elements?

• Pre-existing stuff is efficient, because the reader picks it up and moves on so smoothly, but what it therefore doesn’t do is hold the reader’s attention as something which is newer to the reader would.

• With nothing new and at least momentarily surprising about that element (however much it in fact makes sense in context), there’s no grit for the reader’s mind to grip on. As my post on ‘desirable difficulty’ explores,

  • Journalists are taught to work with received phrases - smoothly painted, if you like - so that readers can understand them with minimum puzzlement and maximum speed, and move on … Un-received words or conjunctions of words catch on the ear and the mind has to work harder – so probably slower – to understand it. At a slower speed of taking in, the denotation, the connotations to begin to flower.

• The same is also true of the writer and their process: the need to go a little further in thinking out how things work and are written - the scruffy Frenchwoman, the male nursery nurse - can push you into writing better and more interestingly, whether or not that aspect is a big part of what the story is chiefly about.

• In other words, when there’s little newness for either writer or reader, the reader’s experience of the story as a whole may be good enough, but it’s weaker and poorer than it might be.

• Disastrously, a beautifully-written novel full of fascinating things may be spoiled by a major character, if they conform to every lazy stereotype about that kind of person - and do so in ways which make a fundamental difference to the story. (I could tell you how I know this, but then I’d have to kill you.)

• Readers may not know what’s missing, in the sense that they couldn’t pinpoint it, but that doesn’t mean their experience isn’t affected. For more about this, click here.

• If your off-the-peg versions of different kinds of human perpetuate damaging stereotypes, then arguably you are contributing to the damage. This is especially egregious if the text punches down.

• If your stereotypes and clichés are about aspects of the world about which attitudes have changed and are changing, there’s a very real risk of being inadvertently offensive.

• Does all this just add up to a command to ‘be more literary’? No - though it’s true that one important characteristic of literary fiction is that the words on the page are more unusual for that subject, or more unusually put together.

• What marks out really good commercial fiction is also that sense of new-and-fresh, however thoroughly it must also fulfill the readers’ desires and expectations of the genre. It’s a different kind of challenge from the challenge of writing literary fiction, but it’s still a challenge - in a way a fiercer one, since you’re working within narrower boundaries of what your readers are seeking.

• With standard-issue figurative language, if you don’t pay attention to the underlying metaphors, it’s very easy to write something inadvertently ridiculous. More about this here.

How do I avoid clichés and stereotypes in my writing?

• If you want to write better, whatever your kind of reader, it’s well worth doing a dive into good literary fiction, reading and studying what those writers do, because they are normally pushing out into newness.

• A practice of writer’s yoga can help stretch and bend your habits of observation, remembering and word-wrangling, all of which help you ‘make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.’

• Get into the habit of practising the ‘other rule of three’:

  • When you have to come up with a character, a phrase or an idea, don’t just ‘satisfice’ by going with the first that occurs to you.

  • Search for three or four more possibilities; there’s a decent chance that the later ones will prove to be right enough, fresh enough, new enough, to do your project justice in the reader’s mind.

  • For example, my post about characterisation-in-action suggests coming up with ten things they naturally own, ten things it’s surprising that they own, and ten things you’d expect them to own, but they don’t. Even five of each of the last two should get your imagination working harder and more interestingly.

• The classic editing questions, ‘Why this? Why now? Why this way?’ can be very useful:

  • Why this? Is this element just what the reader would expect to encounter? Would something fresher and less expected do the same job for the plot?

  • Why now? Moving things around can make familiar tropes and situations come up fresher, without you having to scrap them and re-assign their jobs.

  • Why this way? If you get feedback that a character is a bit of a cliché, then it may be the words, not the idea, that need tweaking so they become a new and powerful (or fresh and engaging) version of an archetype.

• If you really do need or want a character straight from central casting

  • one trick is to include a parallel character which is the opposite: balance your gay male hairdresser with a hairdresser who has opposite identities in several ways

  • interrogate it: make your Frenchwoman aware of the imperative to be stylish, and show something of her more complex relationship with that social pressure. We don’t need swathes of pop-psychology: a few gestures or tones of voice may well be enough.

  • run some aspect in opposition: make your wise old mentor also bad-tempered, discontented and frequently getting something else wrong

• If you find a voice - narrative or character’s - rather clichéd, it’s just possible that the solution is to make that a feature, rather than a bug: do it more, wholeheartedly, full-throttle, until it becomes something that evokes their character. Just check that the other voices in the story also have that much individuality and intensity so things don’t get lopsided.

• For ways to write ethically about identities other than your own, try this post.

• When it comes to stereotypes and possible offensiveness, it is of course always your choice as to what and how far you change things to accord with readers’ sensitivities. But I’m unconvinced that a general spray of offensiveness is the best way to combat the wilder reaches of the new conformity: it’s always more powerful to concentrate on challenging specific things which really matter.

Happy Writing!

1. = AmEng preppy.