Free Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark Page A

crave a peek at his hand. Whoever used this metaphor first wrote something fresh, but with overuse it became familiar — and stale.
    "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print," writes George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language." Using cliches, he argues, is a substitute for thinking, a form of automatic writing: "Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." That last phrase is a fresh image, a model of originality.
    The language of the people we write about threatens the good writer at every turn. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of sports. A postgame interview with almost any athlete in any sport produces a quilt of cliches:
    "We fought hard."
    "We stepped up."
    "We just tried to have some fun."
    "We'll play it one game at a time."
    It's a miracle that the best sports writers have always been so original. Consider this description by Red Smith of one of baseball's most famous pitchers:
    This was Easter Sunday, 1937, in Vicksburg, Miss. A thick-muscled kid, rather jowly, with a deep dimple in his chin, slouched out to warm up for the Indians in an exhibition game with the Giants. He had heavy shoulders and big bones and a plowboy's lumbering gait. His name was Bob Feller and everybody had heard about him.
    So what is the original writer to do? When tempted by a tired phrase, such as "white as snow," stop writing. Take what the practitioners of natural childbirth call a cleansing breath. Then jot down the old phrase on a piece of paper. Start scribbling alternatives:
    white as snow
    white as Snow White
    snowy white
    gray as city snow
    gray as the London sky
    white as the Queen of England
    Saul Pett, a reporter known for his style, once told me that he created and rejected more than a dozen images before brainstorming led him to the right one. Such duty to craft should inspire us, but the strain of such effort can be discouraging. Under pressure, write it straight: "The mayor is keeping his plans secret." If you fall back on the cliche, make sure there are no other cliches nearby.
    More deadly than cliches of language are what Donald Murray calls "cliches of vision," the narrow frames through which writers learn to see the world. In Writing to Deadline, Murray lists common blind spots: victims are always innocent, bureaucrats are lazy, politicians are corrupt, it's lonely at the top, the suburbs are boring.
    I have described one cliche of vision as first-level creativity. It's impossible, for example, to survive a week of American news without running into the phrase "but the dream became a nightmare." This frame is so pervasive it can be applied to almost any story: the golfer who shoots 33 on the front nine, but 44 on the back; the company CEO jailed for fraud; the woman who suffers from botched plastic surgery. Writers who reach the first level of creativity think they are clever. In fact, they settle for the ordinary, that dramatic or humorous place any writer can reach with minimal effort.
    I remember the true story of a Florida man who, walking home for lunch, fell into a ditch occupied by an alligator. The gator bit into the man, who was rescued by firefighters. In a writing workshop, I gave writers a fact sheet from which they wrote five leads for this story in five minutes. Some leads were straight and newsy, others nifty and distinctive, but almost everyone in the room, including me, had this version of a lead sentence: "When Robert Hudson headed home for lunch Thursday, little did he know that he'd become the meal." We agreed that if thirty of us had landed on the same bit of humor, it must be obvious: first-level creativity. We discovered the next level in a lead that read, "Perhaps to a ten-foot alligator, Robert Hudson tastes like chicken." We also agreed that we preferred straight writing to the first pun that came to