I’m about to
give you a piece of advice I got from an agent at a SCBWI New Jersey workshop.
The workshop and one-on-one critique with the agent cost me a nice bit of money
and a trip to Princeton, but I’m about to give it to you for FREE!
How lucky
does that make you?
During my
critique, the subject of clichés came up, not because my manuscript had any
clichés, but because I wanted tips on how to avoid them.
The agent
told me, “If everyone else goes ones way, go the other way.”
Simple,
right? If everyone turns right, you turn left. If everyone zigs, you zag. If everyone
is doing something one way, then it’s a cliché. Don’t do it that way. Do it the
opposite way. Leave the beaten path
and forge your own. It’s that easy.
When we
think of clichés, we usually think of over-used expressions, like “head over heels
in love.” But clichés can be bigger things, too.
Everyone is
writing dystopian? Zag, and write whatever the opposite of dystopian is in your
eyes. (For me, that would be a science-fiction comedy.) Or zag, and write a
dystopian that breaks all the clichés and completely changes what people think
a dystopian novel is supposed to be! After all, no one need another dystopian
novel that’s exactly like the hundreds of others already out there.
So how do
you zag?
Should you
always zag where everyone else zigs?
I don’t think so. But you should always zag
when zigging feels somehow wrong to you, it doesn’t fit your story, or it makes
your story less of what you’re trying to make it.
You should
also try to consider the possibility
of zagging, even if you choose to zig in the end. It should always be a choice,
not something you did because you were following the crowd—or trying hard not
to follow the crowd. You shouldn’t zag for zagging’s sake. You should do it
because you like that’s your preferred choice.
And now I’m
down to another Z: Zero!
I’ve reached
the end of this blog post, which means I have zero posts left to write in the #AtoZChallenge. I did it! Hope you
liked it and that it helped or at least entertained you in some way.
Maybe I’ll
do it again next year, this time in April!
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