The Vague, the Cliché, and the Precious

I was recently talking to a scholar about teaching creative writing, and I realized there are a few things that I think of as common knowledge, but they are decidedly not! So I figured I would talk about some of those things here. I want to start with the three most common things that I was confronted with in introductory creative writing classrooms: the Vague, the Cliché, and the Precious.

(I’m also going to include some writing exercises that can help students, but also that a writer at any stage of their writing life might enjoy!)

The Vague

What it is: The Vague is just what you’d expect—the writing is vague and unclear. It’s not that the writing doesn’t make sense (it’s not that kind of unclear), but more that the author’s intention is unclear. In a student’s mind, the writing is mysterious or open to interpretation. They usually justify it by saying how they’re appealing to a larger audience by leaving room for any interpretation. I counter this by reminding them that a reader comes to a particular writer’s piece to hear from that writer. This often has to do with reminding a student that their voice has value. Saying something is nothing to fear.

Another way to counter the students’ attraction to the Vague is using the workshop. An extremely important part of the workshop is to let a few students state, clearly and without judgement, what they think the poem is about. A teacher can also point to specific moments and ask a student (or a few) to say what they think is happening at that moment. That’s an opportunity for the writer to hear what is/isn’t coming through in their work, and they might feel an urge to better capture what it is that they want to say.

A Prompt: To combat the vague through a prompt you can try this one. Take a poem that you like and explain it in a short sentence, and then overexplain it. Take each line or image and expand on it. Be absurd, repetitive, add similes, whatever you want to do. Discuss (as a group) or notice (on your own) where the strengths and weaknesses ended up. Discuss/notice where clarity was lost or gained and what effect that had. Notice what you were drawn to as a writer—what moments, what images, what words in the original piece, and what techniques energized your writing when you expanded on those moments. A lot of writers love to add similes. Did that happen for you?

The Cliché

What it is: The Cliché is the most difficult for a beginning writer to spot. They are sure that what they’ve written is unique. And it is similarly difficult for a teacher to teach writers how to spot cliché. Even when a teacher tries to identify clichés for them, writers tend to be defensive. The main thing is that beginning writers need to read. A lot. It’s even a good idea for them to read mediocre writing, because clichés aren’t avoided and edited out in mediocre writing, and then it becomes more clear to beginning writers that those are indeed clichés. Sometimes I would joke with my fiction students that they weren’t allowed to bring me any plot lines that I’d seen in a Law & Order: SVU episode, but it also wasn’t a joke! Watching TV can be as helpful as reading when we’re discussing plotlines.

This is also another place where the workshop comes into play. I once had a whole classroom erupt into feedback about how a story was too similar to a The Walking Dead episode. And the funniest thing about it was that the writer didn’t watch the The Walking Dead! No one believed him but me. I believed him because I know how cliché plotlines are through various TV shows. The other students weren’t just noticing similarities to The Walking Dead; they were noticing clichés throughout our media.

Similar to The Vague, students need to value what they bring to the table, but to tackle The Cliché, they also need to figure out what they bring to the table. That’s very tricky to do. I didn’t write fiction until I was 32, and that was because I didn’t think I had anything to offer that genre. I was okay waiting it out, but there are other ways to find what you can offer.

A Prompt: Write clichés, and then write past them. A good place to start is with a simile from Shakespeare, like “as cold as ice” or “dead as a doornail,” or a simile from a fairy tale, “lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.” Any would work! First, you have to allow yourself to write a few more clichés as you work out from the original. You’re not going to instantly come to original language. We have a lot of common associations built into words, and it’s okay to acknowledge that. If we start with “as cold as ice,” we might move to “as cold as snow,” “as cold as winter.” To push past those, we might get more specific, “as cold as the first time I put my hand in a bowl of ice water—my mother had prepared it for me, told me to leave my hand there for ten minutes, thirty even, because I’d burned myself and a blister was forming.” Or we might lean toward the absurd, “as cold as the lake if all of the fish had turned to ice. I could see them bobbing to the surface until every inch of it was covered.” I might even have students try both for a lot of clichés. The important thing is, once you have a lot of new images, see what it is that defines your images. Do you work towards first person (the way I’ve done)? Do you prefer writing into the stranger images? Do you like to write into the past? Do you like to write about animals? You can learn so much about yourself as a writer by observing where it is that you naturally drift when you’re writing an image, when you’re not trying to write a whole poem or story. Knowing what it is that makes your writing yours can help guide your writing moving forward.