Prose checks › Clichés Pro
Prose check: clichésShe let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
(Sorry.) Stock phrases slide right past your reader without making a picture. Falcontext’s cliché checker finds them in your narration, so the moments that matter get words of their own.
What counts as a cliché?
A phrase so worn your reader doesn’t see it any more: a chill ran down her spine, time stood still, her heart skipped a beat, in the blink of an eye, blood ran cold, the calm before the storm, in the nick of time.
And they love to cluster where the scene matters most. Which is exactly where you want fresh words.
Where the list comes from
My own list of fiction clichés (yes, the breath she didn’t know she was holding is on it), plus the open-source no-cliches list, trimmed for novels. Business-speak is out, and so are phrases that are usually literal in a story: “out of the woods”, “in hot water”.
How many is normal?
Very few. Across the 38 published books I measured, the middle one had 0.7 clichés per 10,000 words. The most had 4.5.
Where these numbers come from.
How the cliché checker works
Guidelines, not rules. Sometimes a cliché is exactly right, in the right mouth. This just makes sure you know it’s there.
- Finds
- Stock phrases in the narration, each one marked in your text. Dialogue isn’t counted: people talk in clichés, so your characters can too.
- Traffic light
- Up to 2 per 10,000 words
- Up to 5
- More than 5
Clichés are a words-pass job: in pass 4 of a self-edit you work down the page and change what weakens the sentence.
Which cliché do you see most in the books you read?
Questions about the cliché checker.
What are common clichés in fiction?
Phrases like a chill ran down her spine, time stood still, her heart skipped a beat, blood ran cold, in the blink of an eye, and let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. Falcontext finds them in your narration.
Are clichés in dialogue flagged?
No. People talk in clichés, so dialogue isn’t counted.
Is the cliché checker free?
With Pro, every cliché is listed and marked. Without Pro it still shows green, orange or red, so you know whether there’s anything to look at.
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