{"id":33829,"date":"2016-12-16T09:15:02","date_gmt":"2016-12-15T20:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=33829"},"modified":"2016-12-16T09:17:04","modified_gmt":"2016-12-15T20:17:04","slug":"one-day-out-writing-aka-a-favourite-cliche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/12\/16\/one-day-out-writing-aka-a-favourite-cliche\/","title":{"rendered":"One Day Out Writing—aka A Favourite Cliche"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thornspell_handwritten-notes\"<\/a>Sometimes when you’re writing — and reading too — you see something so often it becomes invisible. Seamlessly blended into the background, so to speak. (I’m sure you have similar experiences from other aspects of life, e.g. “domestic blindness”.)<\/p>\n

One of the great things about writing, though, is that part of the discipline is to look at what you’re writing (as well as the world you’re writing about, Emily Dickinson style) “slant”. This involves looking out for cliches (although they’re very tricksy and adept at slippin’ by ya) and phrases that appear to mean something but actually don’t make much sense when examined closely.<\/p>\n

One of my favourites is “an invisible breeze”, which begs the question as to what breeze, anywhere, is actually visible. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

\"It's<\/a>

Gotta use that edit power!<\/p><\/div>\n

Another is, “S\/he said through clenched teeth.”<\/em> Familiar right? I suspect you’ve encountered versions of it reasonably frequently. Possibly because of its ubiquity, I find the temptation to write it myself is fairly strong (strong enough that it may very well have slipped into one of my manuscripts, especially in “Helen the Early Writing Years.”)<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing, have you ever tried to speak through clenched teeth? That’s right, grit those teeth, clench that jaw — and now try and speak…<\/p>\n

So far, I have found it a physical impossibility and so it will never (consciously) appear in my writing again. However, if you can manage the feat I’d certainly be interested in hearing of your success. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Note: \"One Day Out Writing\" is a riff on the title of an Alan Duff novel, \r\nOne Night Out Stealing<\/em> (1991.)<\/pre>\n
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Sometimes when you’re writing — and reading too — you see something so often it becomes invisible. Seamlessly blended into the background, so to speak. (I’m sure you have similar experiences from other aspects of life, e.g. “domestic blindness”.) One of the great things about writing, though, is that part of the discipline is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-writing","category-funstuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33829"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33835,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33829\/revisions\/33835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}