Your story’s written, your characters fleshed out, your first draft done. You’re just about to begin editing — your highlighter hovering above the page, red pen ready by your side to catch any mistakes — when it hits you.
One of the characters, or plot lines, or concepts, has been so overused it’s cliched.
Maybe not just one of the characters, but most or even all of them fall into this category.
You dive through your notes, trying to convince yourself it isn’t true, but deep down you know it: your readers have seen this character a dozen times before. Your perfect protagonist, his epic love interest, or your hysterical side-character, is just another tired old cliche.
We’ve talked about how to fix this with a minor character, but finding a cliche in one of your main characters is a whole different story.
So is your book done for? Am I here to send you back to the drawing board, to tell you to look for a new idea, or encourage you that just because one story didn’t work out doesn’t mean the next one has to be bad?
Not at all.
If you’re here, there’s hope. And if you haven’t been there, you will be eventually. One time or another, you’re going to inevitably find yourself staring down an accidentally-cliched character with no way to change them and keep the heart of your story the same.
So what should you do?
DreamWork’s 2010 How to Train Your Dragon just so happens to have the answer.
How To Train Your Dragon
Hiccup is a young viking in a world where they have one job — to protect each other from the dragons that plague their village. Unfortunately, Hiccup turns out to be just terrible at killing dragons. As much as he wants to live up to his father, Stoic’s, expectations, his scrawny frame isn’t doing him any favors. He can’t manage to do much but help the local blacksmith, Gobber, in his shop, but he longs to kill a dragon and win the praise of his father, the recognition of the village, and maybe even the heart of Astrid.
Astrid is just about everything Hiccup isn’t, and everything he wants to be. She’s brave, strong, the best of the young viking fighters, and sure in her identity. Hiccup isn’t sure who he is yet. But he knows that killing a dragon is the first step in his rite of passage.
His entire world is flipped upside down when he’s finally given the chance. Looking into the dragon’s eyes as it lies down defenseless in front of him, he sees something in it that he’s felt a thousand times before, himself — fear. It’s weak, underestimated, alone, just like him. And in that moment, he realizes he can’t kill it.
His decision to let the dragon go sparks a chain reaction of choices and ideas that challenge everything his village stands for. It changes his relationship with everyone from Astrid to Gobber. His former enemies become his only allies by his side when he’s forced to face down an inevitable conflict against tradition, his whole village, and, most importantly, his own father.
Cliches With Nuance
Hiccup is part of a troupe we’ve seen so often that, if I started listing examples, we’d be here all day. He’s the teenage guy with different dreams than the expectations his family has laid out for him. Whether he’s the artistic son of a football coach or the prince who doesn’t want to go to war, these characters span all kinds of settings and genres. They can easily get annoying because they’re so rarely wrong and so often young champions of a righteous cause without room for growth or development.
Astrid is part of a trope that’s been overused too. Tigress from Kung-Fu Panda, Mako Mori from Pacific Rim, and Collette from Ratitouee are all girl-boss characters meant to show just how impressive our young, upstart protagonist is when he happens to be better than her at her specialty. This cliche especially annoys me because although it’s meant to show that both this character and the protagonist are insanely gifted (she has the title, he earns experience by showing her up) in the end they’re often written off as arrogant and selfish to generate extra tension with the protagonist. Not to mention, they rarely get a moment to shine. Their experience, hard work, and reputation feel like a cheap plot device to show off the main protagonist without having a real impact on their character or the plot.
Stoic is the stubborn-and-traditional father, Gobber’s the odd-but-well-meaning mentor, and Hiccup’s mother is the absent-but-admired parental figure. Each of these troupes come with countless characters just like them and a whole list of traits they can’t seem to escape. Yet somehow… the characters in How To Train Your Dragon did just that.
Each one of them are so fresh and unique and charming that you have to take a step back from the movie to realize that they actually fill quite stereotypical roles in the story. Instead of seeming tired and cliched, where you can quote every line before they come out of the character’s mouths, their dialogue is new and witty.
So how did the writers manage this?
Essentially, they gave their characters a depth that cliches lack.
If Hiccup’s the teenager with aspirations completely different from his family, he should be driven by a desire to break free and be unique, motivated by an innate sense that he’s just “different.” He should be tired with his family’s traditions, sure that there’s more just beyond the horizon, and determined to show everyone around him the light he’s sure they’ll come to see.
Instead, he’s motivated by a desire to please his family. He’s not a bleeding-heart on a crusade to save dragons from his cruel society, but instead only makes the choice he did to save Toothless because he realized one of the dragons was just like him — alone, defenseless, and scared. That moment of connection is all it took for him to completely change the trajectory of his entire life. It didn’t have to be an over-done movie-long conflict between Hiccup and society for that decision to make sense or come with massive personal consequences.
In the same way, Astrid could have easily been the arrogant, insecure girl-boss with the awesome title created only to be knocked down to show how naturally talented the protagonist is, but she’s so much more than that. Her willingness to stand up for Hiccup, to protect him, to fall by his side if need be, shows that her initial irritation and determination to find out what he’s hiding didn’t come from an insecurity. She didn’t need the title of “best dragon hunter” to be her identity. That could change, her assumptions of Hiccup could be completely wrong, and she would still be secure in who she was. Initially, she simply felt irritated that years of hard work were going to waste without explanation. She set out to find that explanation, but was still willing to have her mind changed.
Because of this, her relationship with Hiccup was much deeper. We didn’t need contrived conflict due to over-the-top stubbornness and arrogance because it makes her seem “tough.” Giving her depth and nuance, allowing her to be driven by a desire to protect, rather than an identity crisis, makes her a much more interesting character.
I could go on, breaking down the other characters, but the trend is already so obvious I don’t have to continue. Although on paper the entire cast fulfilled basic, cliched roles, in reality their actions, words, and choices show that they are motivated by unique desires.
So if you’re staring down a cast of cliches wondering if your story is even salvageable, make sure their motivations — their goals, desires, and fears — are unique. The reason that cliches are so tired is because the core of who they are as characters is controlled by their external characteristics. If they’re a teen, they have to be rebellious and longing to be “different.” If they’re a skilled female side-character, that skill has to define their very identity. If they’re a parent of a teen, they have to be well-meaning but too driven by tradition to see the benefits of trying something new.
So switch up their core. Their external characteristics can stay the same, but make sure the heart of who they are — the person they would be if their age, gender, and circumstances were completely different — is something fresh and new. That difference will begin to leak out into their dialogue, choices, and persona until your readers can tell your character is much more than the basic cliche they seem on the surface, even if they can’t put their finger on exactly what makes them different.
When you let your characters break out of this simple mold and become something new — even if, on paper, they fill a basic and over-used role — they become vibrant, unique individuals that jump off the page and feel larger-than-life. The existence of these characters is the reason that writers (and readers) come back to them, over and over and over again. It’s those few gems, standing above a crowd of characters who seem at first glance just like them, who are the reason the troupe exists to begin with.
Let us know:
What other stories have you noticed pull of cliches and do it well? Do you have any cliches you know about in your own WIP?
Hi! My name is Mara, and I’m a Christian artist, violinist, and blogger. I remember the day that I decided that I would learn something new about what makes a good story from every book I picked up — whether it was good, bad, or a mixture of both. I use this blog as a way of sharing some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned, and highlight which books, cartoons, and movies have taught me the most about writing an awesome story.