My point is that it's all cliche, to a significant degree. In mysteries and certain kinds of horror, the killer's either going to be a man or a woman, as is the victim. You go to a ghost story for, well, a ghost. Same with vampires, werewolves, etc. If you want to approach plot and character from a point of view of irony, with emotional distance and intellectual curiosity, then I suppose you'll want post-modern with its own unique way of doing and saying things. But like New Wave, splatterpunk, experimental fiction in general, you pretty much know what you're going to get. There's an expectation of predictability in the fiction readers seek out. We want gore. Or atmosphere. Or footnotes.The whole post is worth reading as are the comments. As one commenter notes, the French word cliche is meant to imply a stereotype, something that has been stamped over and over until it has lost its freshness.
So these question arise: when is a story convention just another cliche? When is an archetype just a stereotype? And when is prescribed way of doing things just too conventional?
Since I tend to think about writing in terms of hardcore structuralist expectations and mythical archetypes, this can cause problems. For instance, using Dramatica as my guide, I tend to approach stories holistically. So if I have this main character in this situation, depending on how I start the story, my ending is almost dictated for me. If that means if a part of it seems predictable or stale, then really the whole thing is predictable and stale and I either need to accept it or start over. Otherwise, if I change gears in midstream just to upset expectations, I end up with two halves of two stories that don't make a coherent whole. It's craziness for its own sake.
Where does one go from here? I think the best way (for me) to approach the problem of cliche and convention is to go back to my little pet theory of culture (emergence, refinement, parody, and revision). Conventions represent that refinement stage where meaning is inscribed and codified. Cliches on the other hand are the later parody stage where overuse and repetition robs the convention of its meaning, making it look foolish or just plain dumb.
The answer then, is to always revise. Attack the cliches head-on and reinvigorate them with our own perspective, our own "take". After all, that perspective (our own), is the only thing new that we can ever bring to our writing anyway.
