by Ben Blatt
Out of the fifty authors I use as examples, James Patterson is the most clichéd writer. That’s what the numbers say. It’s not just his dialogue, as in this graph, that accounts for this; his prose sections are dense with familiar phrases as well. Here’s an excerpt from the first Alex Cross book, with the phrases Ammer considers clichés in bold:
Michael Goldberg weighed next to nothing in his arms, which was exactly what he felt about him. Nothing. Then came the little princess, the little pride and joy, Maggie Rose Dunne. All the way from La-la-land originally.
If you go over that list above you might begin to have some sympathy for the blockbuster author. His competition is stacked against him. Jane Austen, who had the lowest total cliché use, was writing two centuries ago. Though Stephen King, Dan Brown, and E L James are all on the list, it might be unfair to judge Patterson against Cather, Wharton, or Faulkner. It’s possible that specific cliché phrases are so unique to time and reading audience that any comparison to older literary authors is meaningless.
But further tests show that there is a real difference in how these clichéd phrases are used in literary and mass-market fiction, even when controlling for time period. Of all Pulitzer Prize winners between 2000 and 2016, the median cliché rate is 85 per 100,000. If we look at the top ten bestselling books per year between 2000 and 2016 according to Publishers Weekly, the median cliché rate is 118—almost 40% higher.
Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer are the two most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction as of this writing. Per 100,000 words, they contain 39 clichés and 78 clichés respectively. Patterson’s Unlucky 13 and Truth or Die, which were published within a month of the two award winners above, contain clichés at a rate of 149 and 183 per 100,000 words.
Even in his genre of super popular fiction James Patterson scores ahead. I took all 127 novels that ranked as Publishers Weekly bestselling books of the year, going all the way back to 2000. This list features some breakout hits such as The Help and The Lovely Bones, but the majority are novels by authors in the same league as Patterson, including Nicholas Sparks, David Baldacci, Stephenie Meyer, J. K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell, and Tom Clancy. Of all these 127 books, the most popular of the twenty-first century, Patterson’s seventeenth Alex Cross book, Cross Fire, has the most clichéd phrases. It contains a whopping 242 clichés per 100,000 words. And of the top five most clichéd books, four are by Patterson.
Most Clichéd Popular Books of the Twenty-First Century
AUTHOR
BOOK
CLICHÉS PER 100,000 WORDS
James Patterson
Cross Fire
242
James Patterson
Mary, Mary
218
Jan Karon
Light from Heaven
218
James Patterson
The Quickie
215
James Patterson
I, Alex Cross
208
Janet Evanovich
Fearless Fourteen
206
James Patterson
Kill Alex Cross
204
Janet Evanovich
Finger Lickin’ Fifteen
199
Janet Evanovich
Plum Lovin’
199
Tom Clancy
Dead or Alive
197
Patterson averages more than one of the top ten bestselling books per year. That speaks to his impressive dominance of the book market. But for him to take up half the spots on the list above speaks to his impressive use of the common cliché.
If you’ve read Patterson, his ranking is probably not surprising. And even if you’ve read just Patterson book titles, it should make sense. Patterson has novels titled 11th Hour, Cat & Mouse, and 7th Heaven, all of which are considered clichés in The Dictionary of Clichés. If we move beyond that master list, Patterson has invoked common phrases in his titles ranging from Roses Are Red to Judge & Jury, Treasure Hunters, Unlucky 13, Sundays at Tiffany’s, and First Love.
Joseph Heller named his book Catch-22, which was so original and memorable that people started to copy him until it became cliché. Shakespeare coined phrases such as “all that glitters is not gold,” “dead as a doornail,” “heart of gold,” “in a pickle,” and “wild-goose chase.” His words rose to the level of cliché when people integrated them into their own writing or speech. Patterson is the opposite. He integrates clichés into his own writing, but clearly, from his massive popularity, he’s a master of it in his own way.
Would Amis agree with the numbers that Patterson is the most clichéd writer? As mentioned above, the two phrases Amis highlighted in his Charlie Rose interview as giveaways of clichéd writing were “The heat was stifling” and “She rummaged in her handbag.” I went through my sample of fifty authors to see how many writers described heat as stifling and wrote “She rummaged in her handbag” in a book verbatim. There was one author who did both: James Patterson.
Sting Like a Simile
In his acclaimed novel The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini offers a defense of clichés.
A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. For example, the “elephant in the room” saying. Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan.
Writers and teachers warn of clichéd expressions that distract the reader. But as Hosseini points out with his animal comparison, sometimes the “elephant in the room” just captures the feeling you wish to describe. And perhaps that’s why certain phrases get repeated until they’re cliché.
Quiet as a mouse. Sly as a fox. Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee. One of the most basic tools that writers have used throughout literary history, across time and culture and distance, is animal imagery—to the point where many of our comparisons to animals now count as cliché. Yet animal similes can still be potent and evocative. And part of a distinctive style.
While it won’t catch every instance, I searched through a range of authors’ animal similes using the following simple structure.
___________ like/as a(n) [optional adjective] [animal]
The formulation may seem so corny that authors would avoid it, but nearly all writers, popular and literary, find a use for animal similes. Of contemporary novelists, Stephen King is the third most prolific user, with 11 animal similes per 100,000 words, while Gillian Flynn and Neil Gaiman both measure in at 16.
The only author in my sample that I found never using such a primal simile is Jane Austen. Classics from the same time period (Frankenstein, Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans) all have animal similes, so it’s not just an artifact from her time period. She avoided them in all of her six books.
Some authors run the opposite. After all my searching, the novelist who used animal similes the most was D. H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Sons and Lovers, among others.
Here is Lawrence compared to a slew of other prominent writers born within the same time period (1850–1899) as he was. Other than Steinbeck and Faulkner, he doubles everyone else in usage, including Jack London, known for his nature-heavy works.
If you want a better sense of the breakdown of Lawrence’s purple prose consider his love of birds. Or at least his love of bird imagery. The English novelist’s first book was titled The White Peacock. His last book was The Escaped Cock. He uses comparisons to birds more than authors like Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or James Joyce used any comparisons to animals. I counted 116 separate bird similes in his 12 novels.
Digging deeper, there are a few explanations for Lawrence’s bird tic. D. H. Lawrence was a p
oet as well, and his best-known collection is Birds, Beasts and Flowers. As you can imagine, Lawrence’s poetry about birds and beasts is very simile heavy. He exceeds a rate of 90 animal similes per 100,000 words. Furthermore, Lawrence was a travel writer known for his anti-industrial views. He was always drawn to nature. In his more philosophical nonfiction he called out moderners for losing touch with the physical world.
At the time, his sensory prose served him very well and his books are still popular among literary scholars. But it’s hard to read some of his sentences in the twenty-first century and understand them in the same way they might have worked on readers 100 years ago. Expressions that Lawrence used such as “bury your head sometimes, like an ostrich in the sand” or “like a scared chicken” are understood, even if they’ve become as clichéd as “an elephant in the room.” Other phrases sound almost absurd today. Consider the description below.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous!” she blurted, bridling and ducking her head and turning aside, like an indignant turkey.
How many current readers wouldn’t be thrown off by trying to imagine an indignant turkey? Would an editor today give this an axe without second thought?
Or would a book today allow the two sentences below to be printed on the same page? They both use the same hawk simile to describe eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking at his uncle with his bright inhuman eyes, like a hawk’s.
Will Brangwen ducked his head and looked at his uncle with swift, mistrustful eyes, like a caged hawk.
What’s Your Favorite Word?
In the 1995 book The Logophile’s Orgy, Lewis Burke Frumkes asked notable writers, including Ray Bradbury, to submit their favorite word. According to the Fahrenheit 451 author:
My two words are “ramshackle” and “cinnamon.”
Bradbury gives an intricate reason for loving ramshackle:
It’s hard to explain why “ramshackle” has played such a part in my writing. . . . Half the time we feel we are ramshackle people, lopsided, no right or left side of the brain, with some terrible vacuum in between. That, to me, is ramshackle.
But his affinity for the word cinnamon is based on a more deep-seated, personal connection:
The word “cinnamon” derives, I suppose, from visiting my grandma’s pantry when I was a kid. I loved to read the labels on spice boxes; curries from far places in India and cinnamons from across the world.
Bradbury was deciding upon which word was his “favorite” when he chose ramshackle and cinnamon. And if we look at the numbers, he does indeed use these words more often than other writers. Of the fifty authors I’ve used throughout this book as examples, ranging from J. K. Rowling to Vladimir Nabokov and Agatha Christie to Jane Austen, none used ramshackle as frequently as Bradbury. And just one of the fifty, Toni Morrison, used cinnamon more often.
In his ode to cinnamon, Bradbury mentions that it reminds him of reading the labels on spice boxes in his grandma’s pantry. Without reading Bradbury’s explanation, would it have been possible, with a bit of statistical sleuthing, to detect this memory?
Of the 50 other authors in the sample, Bradbury uses spice more than 48 of the other authors. His use of the word curry, which he mentioned alongside cinnamon in his explanation, is not high. However, many other flavors that might be associated with a pantry, such as spearmint, vanilla, peppermint, nutmeg, onion, licorice, and lemon, are used by Bradbury at a high rate in many of his books. In several cases he uses the word more often than any of his peers. Below are the fifty authors and Bradbury ranked in terms of their use of each word. (No modification was made to the context of these flavor words. For instance, E L James’s high use of vanilla in Fifty Shades of Grey can be explained by her use of the phrase “vanilla sex.” Curry refers to the spice as well as the dish. The use of curry as a verb does not alter the rankings.)
1ST
2ND
3RD
Cinnamon
Toni Morrison
Ray Bradbury
Khaled Hosseini
Curry
Neil Gaiman
Zadie Smith
J. K. Rowling
Spearmint
Ray Bradbury
Gillian Flynn
George Orwell
Spice
Salman Rushdie
James Joyce
Ray Bradbury
Vanilla
E L James
Ray Bradbury
Chuck Palahniuk
Peppermint
E. B. White
Ray Bradbury
George Orwell
Nutmeg
Ray Bradbury
Neil Gaiman
Chuck Palahniuk
Licorice
Ray Bradbury
Chuck Palahniuk
Jonathan Franzen
Onion
James Joyce
Michael Chabon
Ray Bradbury
Lemon
Ray Bradbury
Sinclair Lewis
James Joyce
Bradbury uses many of these spice words at an unusual level. If you put full faith in the data, you might even come to the conclusion that cinnamon is not his favorite word when compared to his fondness for the words spearmint, vanilla, peppermint, licorice, or nutmeg.
To narrow in on one word, his use of spearmint is much more anomalous than cinnamon. It’s not surprising that Bradbury used cinnamon often; it’s a common word. But no other author in my sample comes anywhere near Bradbury’s use of spearmint. He uses the word nearly as many times in his 11 novels as all other fifty authors combined in their 550-plus books (including variants such as spear-mint or spear mint). Bradbury’s love of spearmint is a true outlier. While responsible for more than 50 % of all spearmint in the sample, his use of cinnamon accounts for just 6 %.
Perhaps, out of curiosity, you want to see a larger sample than the fifty I selected. One safe option would be the Corpus of Historical American English. It’s a sample of works from 1810 to 2009 that totals 385 million words (about six times the number of words in the sample of fifty authors) assembled by linguists at Brigham Young University. The corpus is not so much about creating a sample of notable novels (as my sample is). It’s good for creating a benchmark for more ordinary writing over the last 200 years. In fact, in addition to fiction it also includes nonfiction books along with an assortment of magazine and newspaper articles. It’s exemplary of written English as a whole over the last two centuries.
Ray Bradbury uses the word cinnamon 4.5 times more often than the word is used in the Corpus of Historical American English. Compared to ordinary writing, he does use the word often. But Bradbury uses spearmint a full fifty times more often than it’s used in the same historical corpus. Cinnamon is Bradbury’s “favorite” word, but spearmint, whether he realizes it or not, must clock in somewhere near the top.
Bradbury’s use of spice words as a whole is high, but it’s not so high as to be obtrusive or all that distracting. On average, it amounts to no more than one or two uses of each spice per book.
On the other hand, there can be tic words that writers end up leaning on a lot, to the point where they appear hundreds of times in a book and can even disrupt the reading experience. For instance, in the same collection of favorite words, Michael Connelly contributed his favorite as nodded. Connelly has written seven number one bestsellers and seen two of his movies be adapted into major films (Blood Work, starring Clint Eastwood, and The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey). He said this of his favorite word and his main character Harry Bosch:
He’s a man of few words. He reacts by nodding, so “nodding” ends up in all my books. I had an editor who pointed out that Harry nods too much. In fact in one book he nodded 243 times.
Connelly used nodded (or the variants nod, nods, nodding) more than any of the fifty authors in the sample. He uses it 109 times per 100,000 words (about once every three or four pages). That’s twice as often as Agatha Christie
used it, four times as often as J. K. Rowling used it, and eight times as often as Ernest Hemingway. He uses nodded fifteen times more often than it’s seen in the Corpus of Historical American English.
There are 119 words that Connelly uses at least once per thousand words. These are words like looked, car, case, something, phone, or about. Of these 119 words, the one word that Connelly uses most, relative to the Corpus of Historical American English, is nodded. Considering he didn’t run any of the numbers but still came up with the number one word he uses disproportionally, it’s fair to say Connelly has a great pulse on his own eccentricities.
If Connelly knows he uses nodded often, is that a bad thing? There’s a fine line between a word you like and a word you’re finding yourself relying on too heavily. As journalist Ben Yagoda writes in his book How to Not Write Bad:
Word repetition is a telltale—maybe the telltale—sign of awkward, nonmindful writing.
Yagoda goes on to explain in more detail the case against repeating words. He suggests not using the same word twice in a sentence, though he says there are some exceptions if it’s a common enough word. With some words, which are distinct enough, he advises waiting several pages before returning to them.
It seems that for Connelly nod tends to fall into this latter category: It’s a distinct enough word that Connelly uses often, but which most other writers tend to use more rarely. Connelly knows he likes to use it, but even so, there are times when its use seems almost automatic. Take these two (albeit some of the more extreme) examples.
From Chasing the Dime:
“But we can go smaller,” he said. “A lot smaller.”
She nodded but he couldn’t tell if she saw the light or was just nodding.