Opening Up a Can of Clichés

At the risk of stealing on of Kate the Younger’s New Year’s resolutions, I want to sneak in here and with a curmudgeonly end of year complaint about clichés.

On fellow speechwriter David Meadvin’s blog, he recently complained about politicians who overuse the phrase “America’s best days are ahead,” a soul-sucked version of President’ Hoover’s “prosperity is just around the corner.” 

I have to admit to some sympathy to the writers who keep dragging this war horse out and plopping it into stump speeches, especially ones for incumbents.  The phrase is a neat way to brush right by the point each of these speakers needs to make, if only to avoid a Bush Sr. at the grocery scanner moment of cluelessness : “Yes, the economy stinks, you lost your job, and your Kmart closed before a rich benefactor came along to help you get that automatic foot massager out of layaway, but there is a plan: It is going to get better, just elect or re-elect me.”

So when does a tired phrase or an oft-wielded political dodge turn into cliché?  I think when it has, through numbing repetition, lost so much meaning that one starts to hear it used, not just mindlessly, but senselessly.

Take my nominee for cliché of the year, 2011: “kick the can down the road,” deployed endlessly by commentators and politicians alike during the 600 or 700 crises this year during which Congress found yet another way to dodge its fiscal responsibilities.

I knew the phrase had crossed the mighty divide into cliché-dom when an earnest representative of the nation’s youth (note to youth, by the way, when you hold your secret meetings to elect your representatives, work on getting someone who sounds a little less like a self-impressed prig) said on NPR: “Congress has kicked the can down the road again, and the nation’s youth are the can.”

No -- you are not.  While I have no objections to kicking the nation’s youth down the road -- if only to get through the election season without having to listen to another self-satisfied late teen talk seriously about not wasting his first vote in a presidential election -- the nation’s youth are not the can.  They may one day be on the receiving end of a flying can, one stuffed with degraded Treasury bonds and worthless Fannie Mae stock, but they are not the can.

What’s your nominee for cliché of the year?  Let us know here or on Facebook.  And don’t wait too long lest you become distracted by America’s best days, which are, you know, right around the corner, next to that old kicked in can, filled with the nation’s youth.

Kate S.

December 31, 2011  

Get Thee to an Editor

Technology has been the great equalizer for writers: thanks to tablets, e-books, and online self-publishing, all aspiring writers can access a large audience, not just the writers who make it into the consciousness of a major publishing house.  It goes without saying that this is a blessing to many writers, and that it reflects the values of a democratic, capitalistic society.  But what of the curse of the new world of publishing?  What's happening to editorial review?

I can't deny I have a professional bias: of course I think editing is important.  It's my job.  Since I have a conflict of interest, I will recuse myself from arguing for the necessity of the editor in the authorial process.  I'll let speak a far more capable champion of the editor.  Salman Rushdie:

"...In house after house, good editors have been fired or not replaced, and an obsession with turnover has replaced the ability to distinguish good from bad. Let the market decide, too many publishers think... What we need, however, is a return to the best kind of editorial ruthlessness.  We need a return to judgment."

Maxwell Perkins, Editor Extraordinaire

Salman Rushdie wrote this even before the current boom of online publishing; if it was true in a pre-Create Space world, how much truer it is now.  That the editor is now an endangered species is obviously problematic for the editor himself; it's no less detrimental for the reader and the writer.

Without "editorial ruthlessness" to vet and improve material, readers are inundated with writing -- some good, some bad, and much that could have been better under the eye of an editor.  It's dismally overwhelming to navigate through thousands of unknown texts: writers, writers everywhere, but not a lot to read.

Meanwhile, the writer suffers from the loss of his unbiased judge and advisor. It's a loss felt no matter how talented the writer -- even Fitzgerald needed a Maxwell Perkins.

The fiction writer gets to play god in his work: He giveth characters life and can taketh away, too.  So, if you're writing, be a benevolent god.  Get an editor to do justice to your work.

- Kate Zavack