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July 2008
Avoiding Science Fiction Clichés
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, Sheila has received several awards, including the Nebula Award for science fiction and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers' conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing at El Camino College. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
cliché: n. a once-fresh idea now starting to smell In Robert Heinlein's opinion, there are only three plots available to writers: The Little Tailor, The Man Who Learned Better, and Romeo and Juliet. If that's true, how can anyone possibly avoid writing a cliché story? The answer, of course, is that you haven't written your version yet. You haven't put your own individual spin on it. But already we can probably see that we'll need to keep our eyes open to avoid the trap of stale, overworked story elements. Let's take them in batches: Plot clichés, character clichés, and scientific gizmo clichés. Plot The first time a wandering minstrel entertained a medieval king and his assembled knights with a spellbinding tale of a mysterious stranger coming to town and slaying the pesky dragon, thus saving the lives of a whole bunch of beautiful royal virgins, it must've been a sensation. Definitely award time! Today, it'll get us a rejection slip. We can dress the stranger in starman's gear, we can make the dragon an alien from outer space and the princess the daughter of a local politician, but our readers all know in advance how the story ends. What was once breathtaking is now simply boring. Most plots that deal with Earthlings battling evil aliens are now stale goods. How about the scientist who invents/discovers something that gets out of control and destroys the world? The computer that becomes sentient? The character who goes back in time in order to prevent a disaster? What about the evil aliens who have to gestate inside humans? Like fish that's been on the slab too long, these plots are no longer fresh. Hold on a minute, I hear you saying. Haven't some of those old plots made good money at the box office? And there's the problem: They've been done. Many times. They're clichés. Characters Heinlein himself favored the outsider, the little guy not part of the system whose non-standard thinking saves the day. Unfortunately, these days, even if the little guy is a gal, our readers will guess how the story ends. The corrupt leader who never has a moments hesitation, the handsome warrior who knows no fear, the wise old teacher, the brainy and vulnerable female scientist, the innocent child who persuades the aliens not to do something dreadful, the loyal pet (real or cyber) that sacrifices its life to save its people—these characters, or close copies, have all been done too many times. And we should avoid those aliens who speak perfect English on their first visit to Earth, have hive minds and unpronounceable names full of consonants, and are only interested in our resources and/or our women. (By the way, what's with all those planets that have basically one race on them, speaking one language that the human explorers have no trouble understanding?) Gizmos It's going to take a lot of time for our star-traveling characters to reach an inhabited planet. Obviously we're going to need some kind of gizmo, and the favorite seems to be FTL, traveling faster than light speed. Or wormholes. Or stargates. But you can already see the problem: If we have a good science background, we can make the trip part of the story ("As you know, men, this ship runs on the X principle...") and risk boring the reader. Or we can wave our hands around a lot and credit the super-duper machine Our Hero built in his garage using old lawn mower parts. Either way, it's been done before, many times, and thus is dangerously close to being cliché. Unless we have something truly original to say about space transport—in which case we should probably take our ideas straight to NASA—we do better not making that too big a part of the story. Then there's the virus/scientific discovery/alien plague that gets loose and kills almost everybody. Telepathy. Immortality. Spacefaring societies that have reverted to medieval aristocracies. Societies in which nobody has to work and everybody is happy. Sentient computers that think just like humans. God turns out to be an enormous computer. We are all living inside a computer. Shape or gender shifting as recreation. And here's my favorite cliché: the Universal Translator device that takes all the reality out of a first contact story. Just about all of these ideas and inventions were fascinating the first time around; now they're just flat. What's a Writer to Do? If we want to use these rather shopworn ideas, we're going to have to turn them inside out and come up with an original twist. So far, I've not talked about the distinction between archetypes in fiction and cliché characters. In fact, that first example I used of the knight slaying the dragon is part of an archetypal plot of the hero's journey. A good example of this archetype operating in science fiction is the Star Wars saga, especially the first movie. (For more on this topic, check the works of Joseph Campbell, especially The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey.) Archetypal plots and characters cause a deep level emotional response in the reader. Our task as writers is to tweak the material out of the cliché without losing the emotional punch of the archetype. How do we do that? Theodore Sturgeon used to say, "Ask the next question." We need to recognize that if the plot represents the skeleton of the story, then the archetype represents the nervous system. But human skeletons come clothed in very different body and skin types, all original to themselves. For instance, we can ask what drives our starman to slay aliens? What if one of the maidens in need of rescuing is a feminist who wants to solve her own problems? How about thinking of the story from the alien's point of view? At the very least, stale ideas and cardboard characters don't belong as the central point of our story, the grand revelation, the surprise-ending-which-isn't. Let's look at some examples of cliché ideas turned into gold by master writers. In The Silver Metal Lover Tanith Lee takes one of Heinlein's basic plots and spins it so that Juliet is human, but Romeo is a robot. (Lester del Rey did the opposite in the story Helen O'Loy.) Or take the shopworn idea that the government needs warriors to fight an alien enemy. Ho hum. We're going to get a variation on the "eager young space cadet" story, right? But in John Scalzi's Old Man's War the conscripts are senior citizens. And if you are tempted to write an innocent child and/or loyal pet story, check out Harlan Ellison's chilling A Boy and His Dog. Here's a story that goes beyond the cliché of gender shifting to the next question, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, where what's important is not that the characters can be male or female by turn, but what that does to their society—and how someone feels about it who can't shift. And in Gregory Benford's Timescape, the scientist doesn't go back in time to prevent disaster; instead he has to figure out a warning from the future. We've all read the stories in which the female characters are merely decorative sex objects—Joanna Russ turns that upside down in When It Changed. For a personal example, the instruction I received for a story I was invited to write for Hitler Victorious, an anthology about post World War II, was not just that my story had to show how the Nazis won the war, but that it turned out to be a good thing! (You can imagine how I, a child who grew up in London during that war, reacted to that instruction, but Reich's Peace was the result.) The what if... question is very useful if we want to avoid cliché plots and characters. What if the stepmother (the archetype of the Bad Mother) wasn't evil and Cinderella wasn't innocent? Get in the habit of asking yourself questions that turn things around, such as: What if the scientist discovers the solution to a problem—and it turns out to be a bad thing? An example of this is Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. Or: What if winning the lottery didn't lead to a valuable prize but to something terrible? (You probably know what Shirley Jackson did with this one!) Well, you haven't written your story yet, so go to it. Start with the basic plot, the archetype, the problem currently facing the world you're creating, then spin it. Ask the next question. Stand the archetype on its head. Surprise your readers. I can't wait to see your story in print.
If you're still interested, here's a useful website that'll identify a lot more clichés for you to avoid, and check out the useful articles on writing available from SFWA. |
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