One of the things I found when I became a mother was that I said ‘Be careful’ a whole lot more. One of my own mother’s phrases was ‘Life is made up of choices,’ which was sometimes followed by ‘and choices have consequences’.
You can probably see where the series title for my books came from!
Clichés and phrases may also take on different meanings depending on our own circumstances. ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ strikes home if you’re a published author – because of course we judge books by their covers, that’s the first thing that attracts us to them. And the cover can tell us something about the book including its genre and tone.
As a writer you’re told not to use clichés, but in everyday life and speech we use them all the time. Every cliché or known phrase has its roots in some past or common experience, even if we don’t always know what that experience is or it isn’t a common experience today. If you’re writing fantasy and building a different world you have to be particularly careful about clichés. You can’t have a character say ‘avoid it like the plague’ if your world has never experienced a widespread plague. It’ll jar on readers because your characters won’t have the personal, cultural or historical experience for that to have meaning.
In Cloth of Grace we’re introduced to a phrase that is specific to the world I’ve created, in the quote below:
He just shook his head and Lady Eleanor answered, “Many years ago, something happened and as a result, Gabriel took a vow not to leave the campus. ‘Until the four seasons meet,’ he said. That was the condition.”
I recognised that phrase. It was a Trader one, meaning something that will never happen because the four seasons go in a cycle, never meeting together.
But each season has a colour assigned to it.
“White for the winter snow, green for the spring growth, blue for the summer sky, red for the autumn leaves,” he said.
Only each colour also belongs to one of the four biggest ruling Great Houses – and two of them are arch enemies so they’ll never meet either… will they? You’ll have to read Cloth of Grace to find out.
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