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.]
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