Cliche

I am far to lazy to hunt around for an accent to put up over that e so for the rest of this post it is cliche. The reason I am thinking about cliche's is not because I just saw a movie that tried so hard to avoid cliches it hurt, but because last week I read an article about cliches. The author ranked cliches on what he considered the worst and most unforgivable cliches. I was sad because some of the cliches that bug me the most weren't on the list, but that is probably because cliche to a point is very subjective. When I was in a creative writing class I read 4-5 stories in a week that contained the line "almond shaped eyes" (I believe most of those eyes were also green) and so now that bugs the crap out of me - but it wasn't on that list (it should have been). The guy did have some good points but that wasn't really what I wanted to talk about. Occasionally when reading articles I'll go down and read the comments as well (I say occasionally because sometimes that stuff is just too frustrating to read or is simply unintelligible). Well there was one comment that irked me and that was someone saying that they would love to see a piece of work that included all of the cliches. I remember in sophomore year of high school my creative writing class had a wall of cliches and that wall inspired a number of people to do the above. In my college classes I also heard a number of people express the want to write in pure cliche. It is kind of sad that writing in cliche on purpose has become cliche - it is also sad that some many people attempt it anyways. So why does this bug me? Well as a writing exercise it actually does have some merit, kind of a know your enemy kind of deal, but my gripe is many people don't really treat it as an exercise. Reading a work of pure cliche is frustrating and boring. It doesn't really feel like it has a point, usually because it doesn't. The reason I think so many people like this idea though is because it is so taboo to write in cliche in the first place it seems like a great deed of daring to completely disregard one of the rules of writing. Thank god people aren't as inspired to dismiss spelling and grammar the same way (although it does feel like they do sometimes). I can admit that I have more than once thought it would be a good idea to write a cliche poem, but I can tell you now it isn't. So as much as I'd like to end this post with a poem about cliches I just can't bring myself to do it.