Enough Already…Well-Loved Literary Clichés

Joanne Harris, author of fourteen novels including Chocolat, has put together ten of her favourites literary clichés.
They include:
The protagonist who describes herself whilst standing in front of the mirror.
Exposition Man, who says things like: “As you know, we’ve been brothers for twenty years…”
Women Who Play With their Hair. Tossing; tucking; flicking; smoothing – almost as annoying as Women Who Bite Their Lip.
Read the full list on her tumblr account where she has also written a short story that crams as many clichés as she can.
I suspect the opening will give you a sense of deja vu….and it includes one of my pet hates: revealing the colour of the hero’s eyes. Of all the footling crumbs of information to burden the reader with this must be the most useless. The only memorable description I’ve ever read that was worth the ink was in a teenage magazine many, many years ago. It was the caption to a photograph of Omar Sharif. His eyes are melted chocolate swimming in pools of nougat…
No? Well, I guess you had to be 11, just seen Doctor Zhivago and never read anything like it before…over to Joanne.
The bedside alarm rang loudly, wresting Lake from her fitful dreams of the devastatingly handsome and charming stranger she had met just the night before at a college party. For a moment she wondered why she had been dreaming of him. With his tumbling locks of chestnut hair, his disconcertingly direct blue gaze and his annoying habit of looking at her quizzically, while brushing a stray speck of dust from the cuff of his expensive Armani suit, he most emphatically wasn’t her type.

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