YA cliches to avoid?

Loser girl ends up with hottest guy in school.

End of story. That one makes me want to tear my hair out.

Girl meets new boy. Girl's best friend who is a boy becomes jealous of new boy. New boy gets girl into trouble. Best friend is there for her. Girl realizes undying love for best friend. The end.

BLECH.

new kid came to town ...

orphans! - grrr i hate them, they are such a cliche

"I can't be with you anymore!"
"No! My life is over!"
"**googly eyes across hallway at school**"
"**cheesy montage**"

"I can't take this anymore! I need to be with you!"
"I agree. We're so damn hot! **ravages MC**"

Too much time on my hands.

Oh, god... Loser girls trying to bring popular girl down. Mean Girls was good cuz they presented it in a really good way, but everything else is crappy.

Oh, god... new kid makes me want to shoot myself.

Exactly! I hate that one. Actually, I hate all of the ones listed in this thread...o.O

[oh so hot] vampire falls in the love with weird, friendless human girl.

Gah.

Girl and her best friend have a fight and hate each other. They end up being partnered together for a science project or something. Friendship prevails and they are friends again!

Blech. I am addicted to pointing out clicheness. And I try to avoid it whenever possible no matter what. Once in class the other day, my teacher was reading part of Cinderella out loud (part of our curriculem, Cinderella's from different countries) and at the end she was like, "And they all lived happily ever after," and I burst out, "How cliche is that?"

Oh, that's another one. Happily ever after is good most of the time, but after a while I'm like, "Why can't the bad guys win for once?" and my friend Annie says, "That's the clicheness of the world"

Wow I'm blabbing

cliché can be good because teens problems are always the same

fitting in
unresqueted love
quest for identity

th real trick is wrapping them in an original story

sorry for the english , i'm french

Any and all mary-sues. The worst are the loser girl who doesn't fit in, at the end she gets the dream guy and is the most popular girl in school!
It's SO not original and it's painful to read.
Anything to do with loser girls, geeky girls, friendless girls, girls with oh-so-horrible-problems-which-aren't-that-horrible-at-all... As someone said above, Orphans. Just bleh.

And romances in highschool novels tend to be a LITTLE bit overdramatic. Try to avoid that...
the whose 'quest for identity' thing is quite a lot of tosh as well. I have never, in all my life come across any teenager who is on a 'quest for identity'. Ever.

Hey guys,

Aren't you pretty much listing the plots for most YA novels for girls in here? Hell, we as the writers might hate them, but the readers snap them up!
And kids aren't necessarily going on deliberate quests for identity, they don't know that's what they're doing, but in actuality, that's what adolescence is, trying to find where you fit in as a person in comparison to those around you. Working out who you are.
And high school romances ARE overdramatic, because emotions and hormones and gossip that hypes it all up out of proportion makes it so.

I guess what I'm saying is that they may be cliche cos they're written about a lot, but they're often based on life.

I agree, there are a lot of stories about the loser girl triumphing, but real life loser girls don't necessarily want to read about popular girls who's lives they don't have a realistic hope of emulating. I'd feel pretty down if all I read about was the cool kids and how awesome their lives are. Bring on the loser triumphing, that brings them some hope, don't you think?

These are just my opinions. You can take them or leave them.

Sairz

That's why I read "boy" books- you know, burn all the girly-girl romances, I want action! Same with movies. Who needs Love's Enduring Promise, we have Sahara and The Mummy!

I actually liked Uglies (followed by Pretties, Specials, Extras) because Tally wanted to be a Pretty, not just to be shallow and have all the guys like her, but because it was part of her society. It's kind of like how in our world, people with more money get more "privileges", like people won't mess with them (because they could be sued by the rich person), and they can have most of what they want (again, the money sure helps).

But other books about girls wanting to be "pretty" or "popular" make me gag and want to burn them. (Sadly, I get most of them from the library, so I can't.) I'm not saying that all YA books with romance are bad, because it's a part of life, or else where would our next generations come from? The government assigning people, like in The Giver? (One of my favorite books, right there.)

But one of the cliches I hate-

The MC is either not popular/"ugly"/unliked for some reason. They have a crush on a hot/popular/overall cool person.

Or else it's a popular/cool/everyone-loves-me character with a crush on someone of equal status.

They always end up together.

What I would love to see-

The MC ("popular" or not, doesn't matter) befriends a kid who's either "uncool" or not exactly hot (not necessarily the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but still). Not their best-friend-neighbor-from-childhood, just a kid they happen to talk to or sit with at lunch one day.

If it had to involve popularity, it would be about the MC not wanting to ditch the new friend, because they like each other for who they are. However, at least one or two of their other friends would be concerned about the impact of this "unattractive, unpopular" person on their (potential) popularity.

No ramnce required. No one even has to be popular or hot. Just a situation that could happen to any average kid.

Not just another tale of "I'm so hot and popular, I want this hot and popular guy to like me" or "I'm so ugly, but I still want this hot and popular guy to like me".

Things I hate:

Opposite-sex friendships in which one person is in love with the other.

Some kid gets away with something that, in reality, would make her a total social outcast all the way to the 12th grade and beyond.

The token X (where X = boy, girl, black person, whatever) has no function in the story other than to be the token X. (This one is done more on TV than in books, but I hate it.)

Sex scenes! I hate sex scenes! Make-out scenes are bad too.

lmao.
Yeah. Bella is such a Mary Sue.

I hate it when small children save the world. Or like... people discover some new world. And WHOANOWAI, they're the only ones who can save it.

Vampires, with the possible exception of Chinese Vampires, because they -are- different and make pretty goofy/scary villains with their crazy long nails. And while we're at it, Werewolves are also becoming mega-cliche', and the Vampires fight Werewolves, but Humans win idea has been cliche' for years. It makes me want to toss out On the 8th Day as a NaNo Idea because it has 1 Vampire and 1 Werewolf as villains for the MCs. (Of course, I thnk I might just toss them out and stick with Witches, Frankenstein monsters and Mad Scientists as baddies. Who knows?)

Makeovers!!! Of all kinds... not everyone has someone totally hot underneath a lot of hair/thick glasses/whatever. And lets face it, all of their problems can NOT be solved by teaching someone how to put in contacts -.- Princess Dairies got away with it, (just, and only through a large amount of girls who could relate to the 'uncool' Mia) but the rest of the 'Popular girl gives uncool girl makeover to find out uncool girl has the potentially to become popular girl' should all be burnt.

YA books always seem to be about boyfriends in one way or another don't they? Can you think of any other issues
teenagers face that could be written about?

There are one or two cliches I despise.

1) That nasty group of popular girls whom everyone in the school worships because they are so dang AWESOME and hot and rich. gah, let's burn those books, make a lovely bonfire, and have a good, old-fashioned writing excerize to describe what it looks like, I say.
2) (as many others have said) Boy and girl are friends, boy and girl fall in love, but girl/boy is already in a relationship O.o but in the end, he/she dumps partner and gets with the friend. Oh, god. I hate those. they make me want to murder the stupid git who wrote it, as well as those characters.

You guys really don't like Twilight, hunh? i guess I am a bit out of place... I thought it was good. The hype is wearing out for me, however. I just liked the romance bit. I'm finding much better stories, however.

I think that pretty much every YA book is cliched in some way. Really. I read hundreds of YA books every year and I can't think of one that ISN'T cliche. So the point isn't to AVIOD the cliches, it's to take one and make it original. Give it a twist. Instead of having loser girl end up with hot guy, have it end with her kicking his ass or something else. It all depends on the way you write it out.

That's a good point that you should just try to write one that is fresh and original.