By PJ Parrish

You can learn a lot about writing fiction from watching football. I figured this out recently after bingeing on both the NFL and college playoffs. (Yes, I have no life but it’s really, really cold here right now. Plus it gives me an excuse to eat potato chips and drink Dr Pepper spiked with Southern Comfort before five, so don’t judge me).

What you can learn from football is pretty simple:

• Always keep moving downfield. (Don’t keep rewriting chapter 1)
• Have a good game plan. (Outline your story. ie be a wily plotter)
• If you don’t have a good game plan, be quick on your feet and don’t be afraid to just chuck the rock downfield and see what happens. (Go where the story takes you. ie be an artful pantser)
• Run north and south, not east and west. (Don’t get distracted by subplots)
• Surround yourself with good guys. (Character developement is everything)
• If you drop the ball, get up and get back in the game. (you painted yourself into a plot corner. Your character sucks. Boo hoo. Get back in there and fix it.)

But maybe the best thing I’ve learned from watching football that’s helped me in writing is this:

Stop with the clichés, already!

I watch a lot of sports, but I have to say football has to be the worst when it comes to really stale commentary. While watching the playoffs, I started to write some of the bad ones down. From my list:

• They haven’t got all their weapons. (too many injuries).
• You gotta go with what’s working. (not sure what that means)
• He’s hearing footsteps. (the receiver got spooked and dropped the ball)
• They get points the old fashioned way — up the middle. (they run alot)
• It’s gonna come back to haunt them. (missed the extra point)
• He’s got alligator arms. (wide receiver didn’t make the catch)
• They beat themselves.

And the saddest one:

• There’s no tomorrow.

I actually heard Tony Romo use that one. I did hear one phrase I liked that I had never heard before. Vikings QB Sam Darnold fumbled and a Rams rookie defender scooped the ball up and ran it 57 yards for a TD. The commentator said, “He got a room service bounce.”  Your eggs Benedict is here, sir.

All right, all right. I hear you. No more football talk. Okay, so I will talk about the book I am reading right now. It’s been on my to-read shelf ever since I brought it back from the Edgars a couple years ago. It was a nominee and it’s pretty good. But then things started to go, well, south. (cliché!)

I began to notice there were clichés creeping into the narrative. Like this: “It was a perfect storm of bad investigative techniques and lazy-assity.”

Now, I kind of liked the lazy-assity thing, but “a perfect storm?” A couple chapters later, he referred to a suspect roundup as “picking the low hanging fruit.” After that, I got distracted because I started to search for more clichés. And they came: eagle-eyed,” “burning question,” “at the crack of dawn,” “sick as a dog,” “uphill battle.”

Now, these are all sort of venial, the kind of everyday phrases we all slip into. Nothing as bad as “When they sprayed the Luminol, the room lit up like a Christmas tree.” But they aren’t fresh, and when it comes to fiction, shouldn’t we all be asking more of ourselves?

I have to stop and make a distinction here. Sometimes, it’s okay to toss in a cliché in dialogue. Characters have to talk like real people, and having a guy SAY he woke up “sick as dog” may not be the most sparkling dialogue, but it has a place, if you’re trying to show the character isn’t the…pardon me…sharpest knife in the drawer. But in narrative, I can’t give writers a pass for stuff like “He was ready to take the plunge.”

I’m going to finish reading the book because the plot is tight and I like the anti-hero protag. But I wish this writer had worked just a little harder on the small potatoes. (cliché!) It’s not his first book and it won’t be his last, because he’s talented. Which is why I am asking for more from him.

Being original is maybe the hardest thing we have to do in writing. Keeping all the plates spinning in the air is hard — plot, voice, character, dialogue, pacing, subplots, secondary characters, sense of place, description. This is why using metaphors and similes is darn difficult. All the good ones have been taken already!

• “The pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does–the pain’s like that, it rises and rises…” — John LeCarre.
• “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish.” — Raymond Chandler
• “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?” — Ray Bradbury.

The good ones aren’t all taken, not really. You have good metaphors and similes in you that not one other soul on earth can imagine. When you write, don’t settle for the dust on top. Dig deep to find what is unique in the way you see the world

But creating effective metaphors and similes is a topic for another day. I was going to write about that today but this post ran long. So let’s start with the easy stuff. For now, just go back into your work and find your little sins. Kill your not-so-darling cliches.

Get back in the game, crime dogs. Don’t leave anything on the field. Because there’s no tomorrow. Actually, for us writers there is, thank God. But don’t tell Tony Romo that.