How Right Do Your Characters Have to Be?

How Right Do Your Characters Have to Be?
Or, who are you going to upset or offend with this book?
Terry Odell

Clichés are to be avoided, they tell us. So are stereotypes. (Still haven’t figured out who “they” is, but my grandfather apparently knew them well, as they were always making mistakes he’d get blamed for.)

But a cliché can provide a shortcut to understanding or visualizing a scene, and a stereotype might offer a shortcut to getting a handle on a character. Nothing is all good or all bad.

Publishers are looking for diversity these days. I’m going out on a limb here and saying very few of us belong to more than a small number of different ‘groups.’ Gender, ethnicity, religion, age. If we want diversity in our books, we’re going to be writing about people different from ourselves.

How do we get it “right?” Is there even a “right?” Can we say all golden retrievers are happy, people-loving dogs? Are all Staffordshire terriers dangerous? Same goes for people. Yet we categorize and generalize.

Years and years ago, my mom became good friends with our next-door neighbor. The two of them went to the beach one day, and the neighbor found out my mom was Jewish. She was surprised—maybe even shocked. Her words: “I’d never have thought you were Jewish. You’re so nice.” The neighbor wasn’t from Los Angeles, where we lived, and her exposure to diversity was obviously limited. Her perceptions were ruled by her experience. I still wonder if she and my mom would have been friends had the neighbor known at their first meeting that my mom was Jewish.

In my Mapleton books, Sam and Rose Kretzer are Jewish, and I’m sure many people think some of their behaviors are wrong. They’re bringing their own perceptions and experiences, and making generalizations. Rose is a conglomerate of many of my relatives. Trying to get a Jewish character right is next to impossible, one simple reason being there are so many different sects or denominations, and there’s diversity within each.

Today, there are warnings about getting diverse characters right to the point that some authors are hiring sensitivity readers, or at least running pertinent sections by members of whatever group their character belongs to. I have a trans character in one of my Mapleton books, and I approached a trans author to make sure I got it right. Was it right for everyone? I don’t know. I haven’t seen any negative comments, so maybe I did. Also, the character was a minor one, and didn’t have a lot of page time.

I do know that after my first few books, which were (and still are because I’m not updating them) populated predominantly by white cis characters, I began including more diversity. Would I ever try a protagonist who’s substantially different from me? Other than writing males, I don’t think so. There’s too much to get wrong, and too many people who are offended by mistakes.

Something as simple as age is another thing to try to get right (which is what sparked the idea for this post).

I get the New York Times’ daily digest in my email, and a headline saying It’s Fun to Be Alive’: 13 Older Photographers Show Us Their Work — and Themselves piqued my interest, so I opened it. Older, eh? I’m older than most of them. I’m not pretending to be any age other than mine, but it’s being put into a box that’s the problem.

A while back, I agreed to read a chapter that was giving an author acquaintance trouble. He’d included a secondary character who I’m sure was meant to be a mood-lightener. Stereotypical elderly woman. Hairnet, orthopedic shoes, walking stick, thick glasses—the works. Her age? 65. I came down fairly hard on the author for that one. I’m ten-plus years older than that character, and that kind of a stereotype bugs the heck out of me.

That, for me, is what we as authors need to consider when we’re creating and describing any character, be it their age, gender, ethnicity, religion, dietary habits—the list is endless. And these days, people are eager to jump down your throat if your description deviates in the slightest from their perception.

What about you, TKZers? How do you get things right for your characters? Or don’t you care how readers will perceive them because you’ll never please everyone?


Cover image of Deadly Relations by Terry OdellAvailable Now
Deadly Relations.
Nothing Ever Happens in Mapleton … Until it Does
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton, Colorado’s Police Chief, is called away from a quiet Sunday with his wife to an emergency situation at the home he’s planning to sell. A man has chained himself to the front porch, threatening to set off an explosive.


Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”


When the Cows Come Home to Roost

Rita, my wife, manages cashiers at a mad-dog, inner-city supermarket where going bananas from loose cannons is the norm. “It’s like herding cats,” Rita says about her staff, although she knows every cloud has a silver lining, and Rita says, “I also fight an uphill battle with bat-crap crazy and cold-as-ice customers who drive me nuts.”

At the end of the other day, Rita came home and vented—as usual. I’m her sounding board, but I have selective hearing so often, with me, it’s beating a dead horse. Rita went on to tell me about this, that, and other things going on in her shift.

Then she asked, “Ever hear, ‘When the cows come home to roost’?”

I looked up, smiled, and replied, “No. But it’s a clever play on clichés. Where’d you hear that?”

“A regular customer and I got in a Covid conversation. He’s sick of the mask thing. The double vax and now the third. And Stop! Show me yuh papuhs, as if we’re in Nazi Germany. So am I. Then he says, ‘Well, at the end of the day, when the cows come home to roost, catching Covid boils down to this. You’ll live happily ever after or you’ll give up the ghost.’”

———

Rita’s regular customer got me thinking about clichés.

Growing up in small-town Manitoba, Canada, was cliché emersion. I could go on and on with local cliché examples like “Pissed as a nit, liquored as Larry the Lizard, and drunk as a skunk”. Life in the fast lane was, back then, alcohol-fueled.

How often do we say clichés in daily conversation? How often do we write them—subconsciously—into our WIP and fail to recognize these easy-as-pie, easy-peisie, sneaky snips of syntax? How often do we miss clichés only to catch a few in the nick of time before we hit the publish button that can bring the perfect storm—that can of worms—of bad, bad reviews?

I did a little Googling on clichés. The Wonderful World of Wiki had this to say:

A cliché is a French loanword expressing an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage.

The term is often used in modern culture for an action or idea that is expected or predictable, based on a prior event. Typically pejorative, “clichés” may or may not be true. Some are stereotypes, but some are simply truisms and facts. Clichés often are employed for comedic effect, typically in fiction.

Most phrases now considered clichéd originally were regarded as striking but have lost their force through overuse. The French poet Gérard de Nerval once said, “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile.”

A cliché is often a vivid depiction of an abstraction that relies upon analogy or exaggeration for effect, often drawn from everyday experience. Used sparingly, it may succeed, but the use of a cliché in writing, speech, or argument is generally considered a mark of inexperience or a lack of originality. 

When I think of clichés, I often grin at how badly sports stars cliché in their media interviews. Take the golfer, “Yeah, just gotta keep the head down, eyes off the leaderboard, stick to the process, and let the putts drop.” Or the hockey player, “We gotta bring our A-game, give it a hundred ten percent, keep the other team on the boards, and get pucks to the net.”

But what about us common-place writers? How regularly do clichés slip into our WIP and how hack-like does that make us sound? Writing gurus say using clichés shows a lack of original thought, makes us appear unimaginative, and unmask a lazy writer.

I did a little more Googling and found some defense for clichés. One article said it was okay to use clichés when you’re trying to sync with a readership and use familiar phrases like back in the day for Boomers and the struggle is real for Millennials.

The article also said clichés were great to simplify things like explaining beginner concepts. It dropped an example of writing a how-to guide for expectant mothers. In this case remember, you’re eating for two was okay.

And the piece I found suggested clichés were fine, if not expected for dialogue and characterization. A fiction writer might use clichés to show a character’s sophistication level or their sense of humor. I’m wondering how when the cows come home to roost fits in with sophistication and humor. (Rita said the guy seemed dead-serious about it.)

I think we’re all somewhat guilty of dropping clichés. I know I am. Thankfully I have Grammarly Premium that tracks and highlights common clichés. You know, stuff like:

“The wrong side of the bed.”
“Think outside the box.”

“What goes around comes around.”
“Dead as a doornail.”
“Plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Ignorance is bliss.”
“Like a kid in a candy store.”
“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Take the tiger by the tail.”
“Every rose has its thorn.”
“Good things come to those who wait.”
“If only walls could talk.”
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“The pot calling the kettle black.”
“The grass is always greener on the other side.”

My cliché article gave a bit of helpful advice on avoiding clichés:

  1. Think about the meaning of the cliché. Use a dictionary to identify synonyms that could replace the word or phrase that is cliché.
  2. Decide whether or not you need to include the cliché. Often, clichés are unnecessary placeholders in writing and can be deleted.
  3. Rewrite the sentence with new words in place of the cliché. For example, if you’re describing a musical with the cliché “comes full circle,” the description could be changed to say that the musical “returned to the themes with which it started.”

My last Google cliché search rabbit-holed me into the mother-of-all cliché pieces. It’s a great site that I’ve never stumbled on before called Be A Better Writer which I’d certainly like to be. However, this article’s well was just a little too deep for me. It’s called 681Cliches to Avoid in Your Creative Writing.

How about you Kill Zoners? On a scale of 1 – 10 (1 being cliché free and 10 being cliché down & dirty), how guilty are you of letting clichés slip into your work? And is there a time when it’s okay to use clichés? Oh, and can you make up a better cliché phrase than when the cows come home to roost?

——

Garry Rodgers is a retired homicide detective with a second career as a coroner—pretty much Doctor Death for over thirty years. Now, Garry is a caped crime writer who fights villainous words rather than crafty crooks and deadly stiffs.

Check out books by Garry Rodgers on his website at DyingWords.net. You can also follow his bi-weekly blogs by hitching onto his mailing list and make sure you connect with him on Twitter @GarryRodgers1.