“The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.”
— David Ogilvy, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker
You ever find yourself spewing cliches? I know I do, particularly when I write a quick first draft. But I hate cliches, or rather, I hate being seen as a person who speaks in cliches.
Fortunately, it’s easy to fix in writing. That’s what second drafts are for. You can always take a cliche out and replace it with something less cliched.
But better yet, in my humble opinion, expressed from my humble couch in my humble home, is to take the cliche and somehow extend it, exaggerate it, subvert it. I believe the term of trade is “hang a lantern on it.”
A couple more examples, with the cliches and lanterns highlighted for you. From Gary Gulman’s “the best joke in the world”:
“All you have to know for this is that we have fifty states in America and they each have a two capital letter abbreviation. But that wasn’t always the case! Up until, I WANNA SAY, 1973… [beat] and so I WILL.”
From William Goldman, I believe in the Princess Bride though I can’t find the original quote:
“It had SEEN BETTER DAYS (or at least ONE BETTER DAY)…”
There’s nothing quite so funny as explaining a joke, so I will end this email here without killing yet another funny example for you. But I hope you get the point. In the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:
“I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.”
Today’s email is brought to you by my Daily Email Habit service. It forced me to write an email I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And it turned out to be useful, for me at least.
Maybe this practice could be useful for you as well? If you’d like more info on Daily Email Habit: