You would never write "it was a dark and stormy night." You know better. You have been writing long enough to recognize the obvious cliches and avoid them. But cliches operate on a spectrum, and the ones at the subtle end are far more dangerous than the ones you learned to avoid in your first writing workshop.
The most insidious cliches are the ones that do not feel like cliches. They feel like effective writing because you have seen them work so many times. But the reason you have seen them so many times is precisely the problem.
Dead Metaphors You Do Not Notice
A dead metaphor is a figurative expression so overused that it no longer registers as figurative. When you write "her heart sank," you are not thinking about a heart physically descending. The phrase has become a transparent shorthand for disappointment. That transparency is the problem: the reader processes it as a label, not an experience.
Here are some dead metaphors that appear in manuscripts with remarkable frequency. "Her blood ran cold." "His eyes widened." "She let out a breath she didn't know she was holding." "His stomach dropped." "She felt a knot in her stomach." "His jaw clenched." "Tears pricked her eyes."
Each of these was once a fresh, evocative way to describe a physical sensation of emotion. Through overuse, they have been drained of their power. They still communicate the intended emotion, but they do so generically. They are emotional clipart.
The fix is not necessarily to replace every dead metaphor with an original one. That would be exhausting for both you and the reader. The fix is to recognize when a moment deserves better than a dead metaphor and to find a fresh way to convey the sensation when it matters.
For minor emotional beats, a dead metaphor is often fine. Not every moment of surprise needs a novel description. But for key emotional moments, the ones your story is building toward, a cliche robs the scene of the specificity that makes it memorable.
Body Language Cliches
Fiction requires you to describe what characters do with their bodies, and the available options are limited. People really do raise their eyebrows, cross their arms, and lean forward. The problem is not that these actions are unrealistic but that they appear so frequently in fiction that they have become a kind of stage direction shorthand.
"She raised an eyebrow." "He crossed his arms." "She bit her lip." "He ran a hand through his hair." "She looked away." These are not wrong, and sometimes they are exactly the right choice. But if your manuscript uses these same gestures dozens of times each, the characters start to feel like they are following the same limited choreography.
The solution is to observe real people. Watch how someone actually behaves when they are nervous: they might pick at a fingernail, adjust their watch, or tap a rhythm on their thigh that only they can hear. These specific, observed details feel more real than the stock gestures because they are more real.
Situational Cliches
Beyond language, cliches can be structural. These are scenes, setups, and narrative moves that have been used so often they have become predictable.
The protagonist who looks in a mirror to deliver their own physical description. The dream sequence that opens the novel. The mentor who dies to motivate the hero. The villain who explains their plan. The couple who argue, storm off, then reconcile. The character who discovers a crucial clue just when they need it.
Situational cliches are harder to avoid because they are often structurally useful. The mirror description exists because writers need to convey appearance in first-person narration and it is one of the few natural opportunities. The mentor death exists because it raises stakes and forces character growth. These situations recur because they solve real narrative problems.
The key is execution. If you must use a common narrative situation, find a way to make it specifically yours. The mentor does not have to die heroically. The physical description does not have to come from a mirror. The villain does not have to monologue. Find the version of the familiar situation that feels like it could only happen in your story.
Emotional Cliches
Some emotions are described the same way so consistently that the description has become the emotion's uniform. Grief involves tears streaming down faces and the world going numb. Anger involves clenched fists and seeing red. Fear involves racing hearts and shallow breathing.
These descriptions are not inaccurate. They are just incomplete. Real emotional experiences are specific and weird and contradictory. Someone grieving might feel a bizarre urge to laugh. Someone furious might become unnervingly calm. Someone terrified might focus with strange clarity on an irrelevant detail, the pattern of cracks in a ceiling, the number of buttons on a shirt.
The most powerful emotional writing captures what is specific about this character's experience of this emotion in this moment. That specificity is the antidote to the emotional cliche.
How to Find Cliches in Your Own Work
The difficulty with cliches is that they are invisible to the writer who uses them. They feel natural because they are familiar, and familiarity masquerades as effectiveness.
One technique is the substitution test. Take a phrase you suspect might be a cliche and ask: if I had never encountered this phrase before, would I have invented it to describe this moment? If the answer is no, you borrowed it from the collective reservoir of overused expressions, and it might be worth replacing.
Another technique is to search your manuscript for common cliche patterns. Search for "heart" and see how many times it sinks, races, pounds, or breaks. Search for "eyes" and count the widening, narrowing, and meeting. Search for "breath" and track the holding, catching, and releasing. High counts suggest cliche density.
A third approach is the read-aloud test. Cliches tend to slide past the eye during silent reading, but they clang when spoken aloud. Read your key scenes out loud. When a phrase sounds like something you have heard a thousand times before, it probably is.
Finding Fresh Alternatives
Replacing a cliche does not mean reaching for something elaborate or literary. Often the best replacement is something simple, specific, and observed from life. Instead of "her heart sank," try describing what the character actually does or thinks in that moment of disappointment. Instead of "his blood ran cold," describe the specific physical sensation: the prickling at the back of the neck, the sudden awareness of how quiet the room has become.
The goal is not to impress the reader with your originality. It is to make them feel something specific rather than something generic. A fresh phrase creates a moment of recognition. A cliche creates a moment of processing. The difference is the difference between experiencing your story and merely reading it.
Draft's Prose Quality analysis identifies dead metaphors, body language cliches, and overused expressions throughout your manuscript, helping you find the phrases that have become invisible to you. Try it free.