When people write books or movies how do they avoid cliches? Just seems like all the good ideas have been done already.

You’re actually talking about two different things: “been done already” and “cliche.”

A cliche is not something that’s been done already. A cliche is something that’s been done so many times it’s done to death, to the point it’s so completely overused that people sigh and roll their eyes when they see it.

And even more specifically than that, cliches are often platitudes: ideas that have been so entrenched they’ve been boiled down to a single sentence. Yes, plot ideas can become cliches (the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the Brooding Misunderstood Byronic Hero), but “cliche” usually means something closer to “platitude.”

That’s different from “something that has been done before.” In a sense, if you take a high enough overview, every story has been done before. Lit professors will say there are only seven stories in the world (Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth, Comedy, and Tragedy), and every story you tell is just a retelling of one of these.

The movie Alien? Overcoming the Monster. Beowulf? Overcoming the Monster. James Bond? Overcoming the Monster. They’re all different; they each tell that story in a novel way.

So yeah, everything’s been done before, and that’s okay. Stories are archetypes. The key is not to invent a new archetype, but to tell a new story in a new way. It doesn’t matter that these archetypes exist. You can still create something new by approaching the story from a direction that hasn’t been done before.

All the good archetypes have been done before, but that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write a new tragedy, or a new quest story. The Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, and King Arthur’s search for the Holy Grail are all quest stories. They are very different from each other. There are huge, vast spaces of new stories to be told inside these archetypes, even though the archetypes have been “done before.”

What you should do is avoid cliches, unless you’re deliberately skewering or subverting them.

A common Hollywood cliche: The good guys are struggling against the bad guys. One of the good guys discovers the location of the bad guys or the details of the bad guy’s evil plan. Rather than telling the other good guys, he keeps that information to himself (“I can’t tell you over the phone! Meet me downtown tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything!”), then gets killed before the meeting happens.

Every time you use this cliche, God kills a kitten, an angel falls, and somebody somewhere burns the pie. Don’t do this, unless you’re making fun of it.

Eunice and I make fun of this cliche in one of our novels:

“We’ve been operating on guesswork, but definitively identifying Dormer as part of the opposition has opened a whole new window into the Adversary’s organisation. I still want to cross-check people on the list with each other, do some deep analysis of their social networks, but I think Serene should know what I’ve got so far.”

May struggled upright. Her body thrummed. Her head fizzed with stored energy. “Don’t you want to wait until you have more information?”

Iris shook her head vigorously. “What happens if I wait until I’m sure, and then I get hit by a bus or Dormer grabs me before I can tell anyone? Compartmentalization of information is a terrible policy, especially with things heating up. It’s like those TV shows where the guy is like, ‘I’ve figured out what’s going on, meet me at the abandoned chemical plant in the bad part of town at two o’clock in the morning next Thursday’ instead of just, you know, saying what’s going on. Record what you know when you know it and make sure other people know it too. That’s how we survive this.”

The book this is from is about a protagonist who gets drawn into a secret world when she goes to a school for wizards and witches in a modern-day setting where magic exists but most people don’t know about it. So just like Harry Potter? In an archetypal sense, sure. In a storytelling sense, no, not at all.

So yes, avoid cliches. But no, don’t avoid archetypes because “all the good ideas have been done already,” that’s impossible.