It is well-known by anyone who has ever listened to music, read a book or watched a movie that clichés are abundant. You can't pick up a romance novel without finding the same plot, the same characters, and the same basic everything. You can't watch a superhero movie without seeing the same predictable action sequences. You can't even listen to music without finding the same overused chords, the same overused themes, the same overused words for rhyme. Clichés are everywhere. They cannot be escaped. This can be extremely hard on the writers who want to come up with something fresh and new, something that will appeal to society, that looks at life with a new perspective.
Well, I'm going to be honest with you. It is impossible to come up with something new. In writing, there are only so many plots to pick from, so many characters to choose from and you cannot come up with something new that will not border on cliché. And even if you try to escape clichés altogether, you run into a different cliché. There is no real way to get around this.
However, let me put a different spin on this whole cliché thing. What if it's not the cliché that is the problem, but how we use the cliché? Clichés are in the world of literature and film and art for a reason. They are here because people figured out that there really isn't anything new out there, and so they overused these and turned them into clichés. As a writer, you have a limited amount of things you can choose from for coming up with your next great novel. Instead of shooting down each idea because it's overused and cliché, look at it, and see how you can do it better than all the rest. Write something good, so good that it doesn't feel cliché.
The truth about clichés is that it's not about the cliché but how you use them. If you can write a good romance novel, people will ignore the fact that it's cliché because it doesn't sound or feel cliché. I'm still learning these things myself, and I probably haven't figured out precisely how to master the art of writing non-cliché clichés. But I know that it is possible, and I know that with practice, the greatest writers to come will have figured it out too.
