At the end of the day, you need clichés

Flick through any guide to writing and the chances are you'll come across advice along the lines of 'Avoid clichés like the plague'.  Good advice, but I think that clichés can be useful shortcuts if you handle them properly.

Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.

Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?"  My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post.  Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope).  The general framework is familiar, I grant you.  That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book.  It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.

When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements.  We're brought up on fairytales.  Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?

Books offer us a happy ever after.  If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?

[PS  This blog has just passed a thousand hits.  Thank you very much for reading it.]

If the shoe fits...

I spent Saturday morning shopping in Cloisterham.  (Not the cathedral city Dickens called by that name.  Another one.)  Proper shopping, not window shopping, because this time I had a decent excuse.  The recent inclement weather revealed that I had worn a hole in the sole of my plimsoll, which became irredeemably manky soon afterwards.  And so off I went on my mission to buy new plimsolls.  I came back with caramel leather high heels with ribbon ties.

And this set me thinking about the link between shoes and fairy tales.  There is something about a rack of right-footed shoes that compels me to try them on.  Perhaps on some level their cry to be reunited with their left-footed partner draws me close.  Or perhaps it's just that I've no self-control.  But there is something very Cinderella about shoe shops.  The solitary shoe looking for its other half.  The promise of transformation into someone else.  The chance to swap everydayness for impossible glamour.  The potential for disaster (in the form of a badly twisted ankle, rather than discovery by the wicked stepmother).  The potential to attract Prince Charming.

Do shoe shops set out deliberately to tap into this folk memory or is it just a coincidence that, for so many women, new shoes mean a new you?

So now I have my beribboned heels, the accoutrements of a glamorous author (you know I wasn't going to manage a whole post without plugging the book).  All I've got to do now is walk the walk.

And to do that without falling over I really must buy some new plimsolls...