I’ve realized doing edits on a few of my books now that I plagarize myself.

There are a few things that I’ve used in several books (and I know several unpublished mss). Yes, it could be said that most of what I use and plagarize of my own could be cliche, but I prefer to think I’m above using chilche’s (I’m not above it, I just prefer to think I am).

Anyway, I was writing yesterday and I wrote a passage that I thought was very similar to something I’d read before. Then, I realized that it wasn’t something I’d read before, it was something I wrote before!

So, I went back to read the short story in question and I found something else familiar. Yep, the same thing showed up in another short story.

So, how do you keep everything new? I mean, aren’t cliche’s cliche because they work?

The “thing” in question is the heroine seeing a particular body part of the hero’s and thinking “big hands/feet/etc, big…something else.”

Now tell me you women out there have never seen a man and thought that?!?!?!

So, if a lot of real women do it, is it bad that several of my heroines do so?

At what point does something become “natural” and become cliche?

And if I’m already repeating myself, how in the heck am I supposed to have a 30+ year career ahead of me?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 11:22 am and is filed under Writing - theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.