Cliche

Since the dreaded days of Cliff Foreshaw in Creative Writing class three years back, and when I say dreaded I really mean it, that man is frightening, I have been really paranoid about using cliches. We all use them in every day language but I don't think it is nessesary to furnish the written word with. Unless the character in question is uses them of course.

I have been trying to think of day to day cliches we use and been trying to think of new ways of putting them. This has been more difficult than it seems and I feel the need to go home and rummage around through my thesaurus until I can think of something more inventive than whats been 'done to death'

I've been working on a list I found somewhere on the wonderful world of the web and here are some of the results... I may well add more as I go along but I have started with ten.

• That's just like the pot calling the kettle black. - calling someone a hypocrite, I would use this in speech, perhaps by one of the kitchen staff seeing how it refers to kitchen articles. Maybe they'd be discussing some gossip or another. How about 'like mud accusing the soil of being filthy' instead?

• The early bird gets the worm. - I have always hated this turn of phrase, birds I see in the afternoon also get worms. I know it's meant to mean that early risers get the boon but to me it makes little sense.

• Good things come to those who wait. - Which totally contradicts the last cliche! Shall I rise early and get what I want or wait for it? I remember my parents using this when we had to wait for things and were impatient when we were children.

• Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise -

• A penny saved is a penny earned - A penny saved is a penny kept in your pocket all day.

• An apple a day keeps the doctor away

• Dont tempt fate

• Don't paint the devil on the wall

• Mind your manners

• Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

This is harder than it looks, I may well have to come back and finish this a bit later on, after having time to think it through a bit more.

Fear.

Found a decent prompt website today and the one I randomly clicked on asked me to 'describe a big phobia' So I got to thinking about my own fears and the effect they have. I am petrified of drowning. While I was on holiday in the U.S. with my family, my sister and I would play 'who could touch the bottom of the pool.' A simple game that I think all youngsters play while clowning about in a pool. This one time, my sister held me under, helping me to try and touch the bottom. I panicked when I couldn't surface and since then I have had this fear. I am also asthmatic so the thought of being unable to get my breath is a bit scary.

It is not an irrational fear and it has several different effects on me when I am faced with the thought of drowning. My throat tends to close up and become tight and I feel apprehensive. I am nervous around boats and the idea of going on a cruise holiday sends chills through me. Large expanses of water make me nervous, despite the fact that I am a good swimmer. I am not scared to go swimming and will even venture into the ocean on a hot day when holidaying abroad. Doing so in the UK just seems silly to me! I don't like watching people drown on TV and often have to remind myself that it's not me stuck under the water and that I can breathe and not feel water flooding into my mouth. I found the scene at the end of the film 2012 most disturbing to watch!

So, after thinking about how I react to the thought of drowning. I began to wander how other people react to their fears, most particularly the characters I write about. I realised that they don't have any specific phobia's. I took one of the female characters, Talindra, and began thinking what would she be frightened of.

She was brought up in a rich privileged environment, not dissimilar to the renaissance courts of England. She's a bit spoilt and rather frivolous, she buzzes about not doing much during the day and doing even less in the evenings. She is good at heart but need a little guidance. She's pretty and seems disinterested in finding someone to settle down with. She's spent most of her life inside in comfort so apart from the anxiety of becoming poor I think it would be most fitting if she reacted negatively in some way to spiders.

I can imagine her leaping onto nearby footstools and calling for her maid to take them away. She isn't brave enough to squash them herself, preferring to get as far away from them as she possibly can. It is not enough for her to not want to go out of doors, unlike a friend of mine but is enough to cause her distinct distress when faced with the fear itself, much like how I am with drowning.

What do you feel?

Lets get one thing straight. I'm not here to post about my boring things that happen during my day at work. Lets be honest, financial administration is a dull dull world and even the people in it don't want to hear or read about it. I'm not going to tell you about how my cats are, nor my housemates or anyone else I know is either. You're not going to want to hear about what I ate for breakfast nor how many cups of coffee I drank today either.

What I am going to talk about is writing, I am here to learn, practice and think about my skills as a writer. I hope to complete a variety of tasks on a nearly day-to-day basis. I have a long list of tasks to do which I will post the results for here and hopefully learn some tricks and tips along the way. I will also put details of what I am currently working on and any of the trials and tribulations I face while fighting my way into the publishing world.

So, for the first exercise...

I follow a variety of people on Twitter and one of them is an author who posts regular links to articles. Some of them I follow and one came up the other day about what we feel. Often, when writing, I tend to focus too much on the merely visual aspects of the five senses and this article suggested. One idea it had was to sit and really pay attention to what is going on around you, so here goes.

What can you hear?

I always assumed the room where the PC is, also the bedroom, was a quiet room but in fact it is rather noise-filled. I can hear:

• A van engine waiting outside for someone.
• Some metal object, which I can only guess is rather large, being dragged across the floor.
• Voices from someone passing by outside the house.
• The hum of cars driving past the top of the street.
• A motorbike thrumming past.
• The whir of the laptop as it does whatever it is that makes it work.
• The wind rustling the curtains through the open window.
• The kittens chasing each other around the room.
• The smack of the keys as I am typing.
• The hum of the router when its plugged in, its a bit old and we need a new one that doesn't hum.
• A crow cawing as it flies by.

This is a lot of noise for what I thought was the quiet room of the house. It's amazing what we hear that doesn't register in your brain. The same relates to the small things that we feel but don't bother to acknowledge, for example right now I can feel:

• The fabric of my jeans pulled against my thighs.
• The cold air blowing against my toes from the open window.
• The ache in my middle finger where I landed on it last week after tumbling off a chair.
• Where my watch is sitting on my left wrist.
• The rings on my fingers.
• The dull soreness in my back from sitting in the chair at work all day.
• I have a vague itching notion in my left armpit where my bra has been rubbing, its not painful and I can barely feel it but its still there.
• My lips feel tight due to not having enough water to drink today.

It's these small details that I really need to start bringing in to my writing, these things should make my characters come alive more so than they do now. It's not just these two senses either. There are things I can smell that when I really sit and think about it, come alive, rather than just being in the background. I guess small details make a big difference.