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That's a bit of a tough assignment, because there is no precise definition of a cliche. But you may find the advice of George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" useful. It's no...
Given that you haven't given us a lot of the givens... Not every romance is cliché. There are formulas, to be sure (c.f. Harlequin, Nicholas Sparks, Lifetime), but just because the tropes are hea...
A good way to avoid cliche in romance is to choose unusual characters as participants in the romance. The love poetry shared between a pair of nuclear physicists could be very romantic without ...
Delays like that are often used in conveying dialog or poetry. I've seen periods used before. I. Am. The king of texting. This man, this. What a monster. He has done something despicable. ...
The sentence where you explain the following is your way into how it should be done: The story is set on the fictional world and narrated in the eyes of that world’s natives. Now, think abo...
I won't repeat my answer to this related question here, but instead briefly remind you that writing about an alien world is exactly like writing about the real world. You are stuck on the idea that...
Perhaps it would help if you had an image or a spreadsheet-style description of each character handy. Then you could dribble out bits of description as things are unfolding. For example, when int...
I just heard a Fresh Air podcast yesterday about this. (I'm a bit behind in my listening.) In 'You're The Worst,' Even The Most Flawed Characters Find Love The writer talks about using side char...
I really think people are much too obsessed with not telling. Many of the novels I enjoy most, tell. Lots. If you have, for example, a group of characters recovering from a fight, just friggin' sa...
Create engaging characters and put them in situations with high stakes. The characters in your first chapter (or prologue) don't even have to be main characters. They don't even have to survive t...
You said it yourself. When the reader cannot concentrate on the story because there are so many adjectives and adverbs, and other details and flourishes. Get other people to read your writing, and ...
While the existing answers are helpful, they don't address what seems to me the crux of this question. The answers will change depending on what you are writing, for which audience and what effect ...
To answer this question you have to consider the purpose of detail. The purpose of detail is to refine the picture in the reader's head. Readers pull images from their own stock of experiences to b...
I'll approach this from a different angle than the two great answers already here. Let's assume that yes, your story is too similar to an existing, fairly well-known property. How do you fix that? ...
There are no original plots left. There are no myths that have not been mined and exploited a hundred times over. And coming up with a new mythos is nigh impossible because the elements of myth are...
If you're story exceeds genre, becomes more than the sum of its parts, then it is original, regardless of how similar it may be. When I'm reading a story, I'm not comparing it to all the stories I...
I keep getting different great ideas that would fit in different stories. You may jot down the idea when it occurs to you, along with a note about which story you'd like to add it to. Jotting...
If you're working in a group, check the level of detail of existing documentation, and ask for guidance from your group leader, or a co-worker who seems to know what's what. Picture an imaginary r...
A key feature of written fiction is that we're not limited to two senses (sight and sound) the way film is. We writers can give the reader access to three additional senses, plus the internal exper...
Conveying your ideas through written words is like carrying on a dialogue with someone through old-fashioned letters, or through email. Notice that the classic big authors received and wrote a lot...
I don't think there can be an answer for this. I don't think you can even have an answer for a given writer. Mercedes Lackey rewrote her first trilogy seventeen times, but now she churns out books ...
If you are in writing to make money, it doesn't pay to rewrite. If you rewrite half as much you can output twice as many books per unit of time. Now, some people will play the "quality" card. But ...
Nothing. Everything. In the end, fiction is not about what you have researched, it is about what you have lived. Of course, writers of historicals or space operas have not actually lived in those e...
I for one, would love to read a follow up novel about a world ruled by orcs. So let me ask you this: Why not write that book instead? In fact, why not make the orcs the heroes of your story?...
In fiction there are protagonists, the characters that the writer wants the readers to identify with, and antagonists, the characters who have opposing goals and seek to stop the protagonists from ...
