YA Cliches!

That's a cool list - thanks!

I am guilty of the "kids in a boarding school" cliché, and because I write YA SciFi, that's really "kids with special powers/abilities, in a boarding school setting." Luckily for this year's NaNo - a sequel to last year - I get them out of the boarding school, at least :)

My nano isn't really a typical YA novel but I class it as such because pretty much every character is a teen but I thought I'd see if I'm going to be using any of these clichés.
#16 almost
#11 (so she's like me)
#6
and surprisingly I don't think any of my characters have red hair.... normally my main character is a redhead but not this time.

Let's see...

This year - just this year - I am guilty of -

#18 - sort of. I have a character named Ruth, but it's more for Biblical reasons that age reasons. But I do have a Jessica and I went to school with a ton of them!

#13 - I do have a semi-mean spirited cheerleader, but she is not the antagonist.

#12 - My FMC's mother is not alive on earth... Ruth's father is God, so while her parents are alive per se, they're not really physical beings.

#9 - Ruth's actually the popular and beautiful one who will be going on a date with the uber geek, but he is very cute.

#8 - Ruth will maintain a diary/letters to her father. It's her way of staying in contact with him and keeping him up to date with things. He's promised not to watch over her all the time and only look in when she's writing in her journal. That way she can live and be semi-normal without him lording over her.

#3 - She doesn't call her parent's by their first names, but she does call her "guardian" by his first name. He's an angel, but going under the name Tim while on earth.

#2 - One of her close friends has red hair. Or she would have red hair if it hardn't all fallen out due to chemo!

Thanks for the list, it's grand fun!
Ken

My official first post of the season!

I've done:

#20 in my latest, MUST LOVE BLACK. But, she did get the guys and she didn't want them :-)
#19 sort of...the reader can tell she isn't wicked (again MLB!)
#17 uh oh, this one is in MLB, too -- there are excerpts from her dead mother's book to begin each chap
#13 (phew, not in MLB, but in my SALEM WITCH TRYOUT series), and love turns her around, anyway
#12 MLB
#8 sort of, texting plays a big part of SWT; and I have an undeveloped idea about a girl with a diary
#5 picture me raising one eyebrow and asking "who doesn't do this?"
#1 yep, pretty much in every one of my novels...must have something to do with the cobwebbed lists on my cork board

So, that makes 8 out of 20 cliches. But in my defense I tried to bump most of them out of cliche territory by subverting them a bit, especially the dead mom author -- Philippa carries her mom's book around and reads the advice in it when she needs guidance

I guess I have 12 more to go in future novels. Maybe I can try to fit #24 and #22 in this year's NaNo? Hmmm.

Thanks for the list. I'm guilty of rather a few of them! I don't mind too much though. Lists, for instance - I love reading books with lists, so I tend to make a lot of lists in my own novels too! And the vegetarian with un-sympathetic parents seems to pop up in everything I write, because that's how I grew up myself.
I kind of like cliches. They're cliches because they often happen in real life. Who hasn't come across a snotty cheerleader type in their time?

24. Not exactly the art room, but my MC's sister (also a major character) is very shy and takes her refuge in the theatre department
17. I might use this. I haven't really decided what I want the parents to do yet, or even if they show up in the novel at all.
13. My MC us a mean cheerleader, and she is her sister's antagonists. Yet, since she's the main character, she's also the protagonist
11. Yep

I think for the novel I intend to write in November I will only be guilty of "# 6 – Characters who chew on their lip or tongue in times of stress – usually until they taste blood", mainly because I do that and my MC is going to be based off of me. Except possibly my MC will continue chewing long after she tastes blood, just because she's so insecure or stressed.

D: It bothers me so much when people describe skin with coffee. I guess it's something to think about though. I guess I'm white, and I went to a predominantly white high school, so by default I visualize most of my characters as white. So when I think of someone as other than white I'm faced with the decision of how to portray that without making myself ridiculous or racist.

ETA: Does it even need to be portrayed? How important is race? I guess readers can visualize my characters in whatever color skin they are most comfortable with. I guess I'd rather not go out of my way to make any of my characters a specific race.

But when you have a blonde or red headed character it's very rare that they're anything but caucasian.

So either all your characters have to have brown/black hair and dark eyes, or you have to think about race.

It's sucky, but sadly true.

Ken

*Blinks* Wow...I'm surprised. I'm only going to be guilty of #5! (I do have a beautiful best friend, but she isn't adverse to the guy wanting her and in fact that's one of the major parts of her storyline...and other than that? Nothing even comes close. Neato, I guess all this work on researching characteristics so that my character's storylines make sense actually paid off in a totally different way, too!)

Haha, starting reading the list and only made it to #23 before I had to mutter, "Dammit." Although my token gorgeous black girl is a bitch, not a friend.

#22 I am not guilty of, but it made me laugh, because I in fact have a scar through my eyebrow from a jumping-on-the-bed incident as a child. Is this a cliche I have been unaware of until now?!

Possibly guilty #8 in a roundabout way.

Definitely guilty of #5. Who the hell doesn't raise one eyebrow? My face will probably get stuck like that after some particularly trying day at work.

# 20 – My FMC has two best friends- one at school and one at the acting academy. The one at the acting academy, yes XD.

# 13 – Yes yes yes.

# 8 – Indeed I'm thinking of doing diary entries.

4 - Main characters who want to be writers.

Oh buggeration (c:

Ones I hate:

#23, 21, 20, 19, 18, 16, 15, THIRTEEN, NINE, EIGHT, 4, 1

Ones I am guilty of:
#24, 23, 14, 6

I took the liberty of highlighting the ones I feel strongly about.

But can someone tell me some that aren't on the list. SOme of the ones on the list, I couldn't even think of examples of they were so unimportant in my life.

I only have #24 - sort of. One of the major subplots is my character wants to be an artist and the school isn't cutting it, so she gets her education elsewhere. Then all the major stuff goes down, and afterward she gets permission to avoid class by working on her big project in the art room. So she's not being shy, but she is using art as therapy.

Yikes! I am guilty...

#25 - Wrote a whole book about teenage vegetarians/vegans/animal rights activists who became werewolves... so, not quite but similar.

#24 - Wrote a whole book called "The Art Kids"... guess where they sought refuge?

#13 - Wrote a whole book called "The Horizontal Ladder" about a horrible girl who wanted to be a cheerleader so bad she had her father off her ex-best friend, the "beloved" cheerleader. So I had both in there...

#8 - I have used the diary format so often... usually it's just snippets, but still.

#7 - I bite my fingernails, so why can't my characters?

#4 - I want to be a writer, so why can't my characters?

I can't recall ever creating a character with red hair, but I have definitely overused "honey blonde" and "golden blonde" haired characters.

One cliche that I didn't see there--how many YA books have characters that spend a lot of time looking in mirrors and describing themselves and their (usually extremely) outdated clothing?

As of the planning stages, I have yet to use any of these cliches!
I feel strangely proud of myself.

Last year's NaNo, however... *blushes*

I am guilty of nothing! Now I don't have to go to Literary Confession...hurray!

hm.. maybe #6 and #7, but I asked other people about their tics just now and will probably change. If they bite their mouths, it's a bad habit, not nervousness, and doesn't count^^

other than that, it's painfully cliché free. Might be because the love interest is a super anti-objectivist, which is a bit of a cliché, but not the way he does it in.

In this years NaNo, I'm already planning on using..

#20 - she doesn't get ALL the guys, but it's at least two (she cheats on one with the other).
+
#8 - a lot of my story will center around diary entries. But it's not my MC's! It's her best friends, that she starts to secretly read.. (yes, the same best friend who gets the guys..).

Hmm... I've definitely used some of the other cliches in other writing I've done!

As for cliches I hate.. anything where the smart kid is picked on for being smart (even worse if they are picked on by the "popular kids"), is portrayed as a victim as a result, and the reader gets to hear all about it. It's just irritating. Maybe my high school was unusual, but soo many of the "smart kids" were stuck-up and arrogant and acted like they were better than other people. And the popular kids were popular because they were friendly and charismatic. (btw, I was not in the popular crowd. I was not in the "smart" crowd either. I kind of floated between a preppy group and an artsy group, depending on my mood of the day).

Jolly good, old bean. Let's go through one by one!

"#25 – Vegetarian teens with unsympathetic meat-eating parents"

MC is vegetarian. Parents are most certainly fine with it?

"#24 – Shy or withdrawn characters that take refuge in the school’s art room/ compassionate art teachers"

MC hangs around with teachers but there's some degree of deliberate sycophantishness there, and he's not really shy.

"#23 – A token black friend among a group of white friends - usually it’s a girl, and she’s always gorgeous"

Story not set on earth and characters aren't human, so this doesn't apply. If I had to apply real-world races to everyone, they'd all be like, Finnish, Samic, French, or German. So no on #23.

"#22 – A tiny scar through the eyebrow, sometimes accompanied by an embarrassing story"

Most of the characters have scars but the fictional country it takes place in a rather post-war Balkanian sort of fictional nation. So by scars it's not so much embarrassing personal stories but car bombs and getting shot and things.

"# 21 – Using the word ‘rents for parents, but not using any other slang"

Oh god no.

"#16 – Using coffee, cappuccino, and café latte to describe black people’s skin"

No, and what the hell?

"# 12 – A dead mother"

Most of them, except for the other MMC, who's parents aren't dead and just living in exile, except everyone assumes they're dead. MMC doesn't know what happened to his real parents.

"# 8 – The diary, either as the entire format, or the occasional entry"

Occaisional entries but most of them are actually essays on history and things (some of which are fake and mostly just descents into Dargersian rants).

"# 7 – Fingernail biting"

Characters aren't human. Do not have fingernails that could be easily chewed.

"# 6 – Characters who chew on their lip or tongue in times of stress – usually until they taste blood"

MMC has weird tendency for nosebleed occurences?

"# 4 – Main characters who want to be writers"

Main character writes. Actually wants to be a dulcimerist or linguist or something. He's not very career oriented and a bit afraid of entering the adult workforce world. Somewhat of a theme in the book.

"# 3 – Calling parents by their first names"

MMC doesn't do this, but calling them by their patronymics is preferable in fictional nation (MMC doesn't do this either).

"# 2 – Best friends with red hair*"

Yes, but he dyes it, and not very consistently, so it's less red and more like this frothy pinkish color.

the easiest way to avoid cliches is to avoid black-and-white characterization. for every major flaw you give your antagonist, give her a corresponding positive or neutral characteristic, too. sure, the mean cheerleader is a cliche -- but the mean cheerleader who is also at the top of her calculus class is less so. don't demonize anybody; don't angelicize (?) anybody either. just humanize them, make them interesting, make them worth reading about. people don't notice cliched elements if they've been elevated above the cliche. some of my favorite ya novels (mccafferty's sloppy firsts, anderson's speak) have more than one of the items on that list, but it doesn't bother me because they don't rely on the cliches to be a shortcut for the reader. (i have to admit that i love it when the main antagonist is not a cheerleader, though, and bonus points if she's something completely antithetical to the spirit of cheerleading.)

of those joelle anthony noticed, i'm equally annoyed by:

- the token black friend in the group of white friends. well, at least the writers were listening in the 1980s and 1990s when people were complaining about the lack of representation of people of color. unfortunately, they didn't realize that just taking their manuscript, changing the description of one of the main character's friends from white to black -- and changing nothing else -- doesn't change anything at all. writers need to look at the social dynamics of american high schools today. most black kids are not hanging out in random groups of white kids. most black kids hang out with each other. those who don't are generally making a conscious choice to do so or are being ostracized, and they've probably got some feelings about it. i hate the books that take place in, like, suburban minnesota and yet have a diverse cast of characters that has no racial segregation (self-selected or otherwise). just try and find me a school like that in real life.
- names from the authors' era, not the current one. this just speaks to lazy writing. the very first thing i do when i'm writing is to research names and make sure that all my major characters' names match up with when and where they were born, their nationality/heritage, and their parents' personalities. one character with a name from a bygone era is fine; an entire cast of them is not. (more popular when i was a kid, although i've noticed it less now, is contemporary ya lit publishing details of school or home life that was clearly taken from the authors' time in school, and didn't match up with when the story was being set -- think gym suits.)
- main characters wanting to be, or parents who actually are writers. this has driven me insane since the days of elizabeth wakefield. it's so lazy! give them another a hobby! (yes, i know you'll have to research it to write about credibly. that's what writing's about.)

a lot of the things on that list don't bother me at all (fingernail biting's pretty common in real life too), and to be completely honest, there are some that i've never even noticed. plenty of her cliches aren't unique to the ya genre, either: red-haired is woefully over-represented in the romance and fantasy genres as well, the dead-or-temporarily-absent-parents (especially the generally more overprotective mom) theme is a common trope in teen movies, disney movies or anything historically based, as it allows the (generally female) main character to get away with behavior that she normally would not get away with due to her age or the restrictions against women of the era. describing people of color in terms of coffee is rampant everywhere, and while i agree it's lazy writing, i don't think it's that weird (or offensive) if your narrator is white. a white narrator would be programmed to take note of the race of people who aren't like him/her. that said, i agree that "black" would be a more appropriate descriptor about 90 percent of the time.

here are some ya cliches that she didn't list but that i've noticed:
- a beautiful older sister that the female protagonist is jealous of
- the token gay best friend who is really flamboyant
- gay character automatically falls in love with the only other gay character in school, or black character automatically falls in love with/is dating another black character, with no other depiction that they have interests or personality in common

cliched phrasing bothers me way more than cliched plot elements. overused plot elements can always be made fresh again if the writing's good. but if the writing's bad, even the most interesting plot will just be eh. (that said, the only cliche on ms. anthony's list that i'm using is the dead mom.)

About the using modern names thing: I don't consider a lot of names that went in vogue more recently (Mid-90's?) to be real names. Am I a jerk? Most certainly! Am I going to qualify that? Most certainly not!

To above- Using very modern names wouldn't make sense. To write young adult you would need to use names from the early ninties. If those are the names you object to, well then your book won't seem very realisitc, will it?

I'm using #12 but both parents are dead and it's key to the story.
The younger sister is also very smart (forgot the number) but intelligence kind of runs in the family.

the nice thing about names is that there are a whole host of them that never go out of style: katherine, emily, elizabeth, daniel, matthew. in fact, almost all of the popular baby names right now are ones that have been popular at many other points throughout history (olivia, sophia, and isabelle/a are all in the top ten girls' names right now). you don't have to use really trendy names if you don't want to. but anyone who pays attention to naming trends can tell you that there are certain names that hit their peak in certain decades and thus conjure up an old-fashioned image that you don't want if you're trying to write something contemporary. or, conversely, baby names that are popular right now (the proliferation of aidans, haydens and jaydens) seem out of place on fictional teenagers (who presumably were born 15 or so years ago, when a different set of names were popular).

you don't have to have every single character in your story have a name that fits in the top 20 most popular baby names of the year they were born. but their names should all at least make sense within the context of when they were born. if you have a character named madison and she was born in 1924, or a character named shirley or doris who was born in 1992, there should be a good reason as to why . . .

If it's a relatively new concept or it's really interesting, I don't usually care how many cliches there are. If you can pull them off, I won't notice that there are any at all.

I'm guilty of three in this novel. Which actually isn't that bad I suppose.

# 12 – A dead mother (Alex's mother died of diabetes in 1916, prior to the discovery of insulin, when he was 10)
# 10 – Guys with extraordinarily long eyelashes (Alex again)
# 5 – Raising one eyebrow (how could I *not* have this!?)

I'm sort of using number 14: Younger siblings who are geniuses, adored by everyone, and usually run away during the book’s climax, causing dramatic tension

My MC has a little brother who's the parents favorite kid. He's not gonna run away or anything, and he's not a genius, but he is adored by a lot of people.

In the past, I have been guilty of numbers 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 17, 24, and 25. That makes me feel kinda good actually -- it shows that at least I'm keeping up with reading my genre (and I guess I write the way what I've read is written).

In my new novel, I might be sort of guilty of number 12 -- she's not dead, but she might have left, or she might just be working a lot -- I'm not sure yet; definitely numbers 6 and 7 -- my character has autism and in addition to biting her nails and chewing her lips, she has a number of other fidgets and sensory activities she is constantly doing; 3 -- Well, actually, she doesn't anymore, because they like to be called Granny and Grampa, but the way she says "Granny" and "Grampa," you can tell she's just humoring them, and in her mind she's saying "June" and "Jobe" and chuckling that her grandparents are so silly that they want to go by a different name; and definitely, definitely, definitely #1 -- did I mention she has autism? Do mental lists count? Because basically ALL she does at the beginning of the novel is make mental lists.

I'm avoiding the red hair one because I love red hair and I overuse it.

June's hair is gray, so it's okay that it used to be red, right?

All right, all right, I'm going to be guilty of that one, too.

Joelle Anthony here! First off, I just want to say thanks for posting the link because I love reading everyone's thoughts on this topic. It's pretty interesting!

Also, just for the record, and I'm not sure if I made this clear in the "article" portion of the piece or not, but I think every one of these "cliches" can be used effectively if there's a REASON behind them. If they're just what pops into a writer's head first (and apparently they do!), then I'm encouraging people to stretch themselves. After I made the list, I went back and looked at some of my earlier unpublished writing and I had a lot of these things in there too (didn't even notice!) because they are obvious choices in so many cases.

Anyway, thanks again for posting this.

cheers,
Joelle
http://www.joelleanthony.com
RESTORING HARMONY, forthcoming - Putnam