When writing, cliches are to be avoided by any means necessary. As advice, avoiding cliches has become so prevalent as to become cliche itself, right up there with “write what you know” and “show, don’t tell.” The reason, of course, is that cliches are comfortable. And, like pillows piled on a plush couch or thick, fresh-from-the-dryer blankets on a winter’s night, comfortable things make us lazy. (Insert Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society here.)
Far worse than being just boring, lazy writing is forgettable. To walk the talk, I want to look at another symptom of laziness in thinking: Stereotypes.
Just like cliches, stereotypes of all shapes are borne of seeking comfort (being lazy). The world is much more comfortable and clear cut when all homeless people are lazy/white people are racist/trans people are mentally ill/black people are lesser/rich people are crooks/republicans or democrats are idiots. You get to stop looking hard at anything that doesn’t resemble what you are familiar with. People fade away and become caricatures, convenient shorthand that can be summed up in a few soundbites and filed away as “The Other.”
The extreme examples are obviously the angry faces you see spitting bile and venom on the 24-hour news networks, but more casual stereotypes are just as lazy and far more pervasive. Muscle-bound dummies, inept old people, entitled millennials, out of touch baby boomers. Even those of us who don’t cast sideways glances at panhandlers and don’t talk to our gay cousin because they belong to the crazy aunt and not because they like other girls can casually stereotype those around us. Especially when under stress.
So how can we fight years of seeing the same safe, stereotypical characters in cartoons, sitcoms, and Lifetime movies? And can we make it useful to us while making us a little more connected to our fellow Earthlings? I think we can.
When writing fiction, I’m always in need of characters. From bookstores to bodegas, even bit parts are a chance to add memorable characters and interactions into the story. In thinking about the authors I love, like Stephen King or Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, one commonality is that every character on their pages are fully fleshed out and feel real. In an effort to start building a stable of dynamic characters for my own writing, I started to look at those moments in real life when I was writing off real people as two dimensional and dissect them.
An example would be good, right?
Driving home from work the last week I was cut off by a BMW. Beyond already being in the set-up for a joke from the late eighties (that poor, inconsequential blinker installer), it had been a long day. A long day followed by a long commute. A long day followed by a long commute in the middle of a humid Arkansas summer in a truck with failing air conditioning. There are precious few other situations that so invite lazy thinking. However, instead of disparaging the other driver as just another BMW snob too self-important to show common courtesy, I turned them into a character. (Full disclosure: I might have disparaged them just a little before trying on a different narrative).
From anonymous BMW hazard, I instead tried to think of them as Rick Flynn, content, if stagnant, middle manager at an accounting firm. I could see Rick tapping the left toe of his rubber-soled leather dress shoes, opting for comfort and affordability over longevity while listening to Cheap Trick. For a moment, Rick can feel the wind from 1979 blowing salty sea air through the hair that had long-since left the top of his head. A brief flash of blonde hair, Estee Lauder perfume and wasted opportunity later and Rick is drifting through traffic, foot to the floor trying to outrun the past.
The best character? Definitely not. But ultimately a useful figure to have knocking around in my head? Definitely so. The BMW driver became more real to me and I got something out of the exchange beyond anger and frustration. Before I started trying out this exercise, these sorts of inconveniences would leave me with impotent, misplaced rage. I would have still ended up building a character for them, but one out of stereotypes. Someone rich and snobbish. Cartoonish. And like other lazy cliches, that character would’ve disappeared from my mind as easily as it bubbled up.
Whatever anger scant brain power I might’ve put into that flat character would have only been good for raising my blood pressure and being forgotten. On the other hand, by putting a little effort into creating that character I now have Rick.
Rick might be the simple seed of a whole character, but I remember him. And fictional or not, the other driver became human to me, not one of them. From Rick the BMW driver to Rose the slow check writer and Sarah the slow walker, the inciting frustrations they caused me were a small price to pay for the growing community of characters at my disposal.
And I guess being more at peace with other humans isn’t too shabby either.
The Barberry Writers 