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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31661
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31661
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You have to make a distinction between plagiarism and familiar ground. Writers cover familiar ground all the time. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back. It is familiar ground. It is not a cliche.

Writers stick to familiar ground because that is where they find the stories that people want to hear. Boy meets girl. Girl is captured by space aliens. Boy becomes a door to door fryingpan salesman in antarctica. That is not familiar ground. Nor is it a story anybody want to read. It has no logic, no shape. Its original. But it's boring.

Cliche is not about covering familiar ground. Cliche is about lazy writing. It is about drawing stock phrases out of your head because they are easy, not because they are apt. George Orwell in _Politics and the English Language_ talks about writers seeing the world and writing what they see vs throwing stock phrase together without ever truly thinking through what they are trying to say. Cliche does not mean familiar. Cliche means lazy, dull, and not fully realized.

EDIT: Dialogue is not speech. Speech is fractured, repetitive, and largely trivial. Dialogue is whole, unique, and consequential. Speech is full of cliches. People talk lazily, often just because the cannot endure silence. That kind of talk is incredibly tedious to read. Dialogue is something quite different and the cliched nature of speech should have no impact on the way you write dialogue.

Original score: 8