This post is going to be about my book, Hellbound, which I am struggling furiously to get published. If you do not know what it is, go to this post and scroll down until you’ve found my hastily cobbled together synopsis. Or click here to go to the more official synopsis on my super official website.
Right. Now that you’re caught up, I want to talk about my character, Aiden. When I wrote Aiden, he was going to be a pretty typical supernatural boyfriend, but there was one cliche I wanted to avoid. Aiden is immortal, and he was born before a lot of modern technologies were discovered/invented. The usual response when a person from the “past” ends up in present day is constant shock and amazement.
I looked through TV Tropes to find examples of this particular cliche. Click here to go to the page that explains it. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize any of the movies it listed as examples. There are a couple I know off the top of my head:
Dark Shadows – never saw it, but Johnny Depp is like a two-hundred-year-old vampire who ends up in the 1970s. Read The Editing Room’s version of the script by clicking here, since that was my source.
TV Tropes is right about ParaNorman – there are some Puritan zombies in it that get all shocked by modern day stuff.
I don’t know what else. Probably Kate & Leopold. And other things as well. It’s weird. I know this is a cliche but my mind keeps coming up blank when I try to think of examples. Maybe you could provide some in the comments?
Anyway, Aiden’s situation is a little bit different. He leaves Hell and goes to Earth every few decades, so it’s not like he’s a three-hundred-year-old immortal who very suddenly ends up in present day Los Angeles. Still, I never wanted him to be shocked and confused by the things he saw. He is occasionally surprised, amused, or curious, but never like, “OH MY GOD WHAT AM I LOOKING AT IT MUST BE MAGIC.” Aiden goes into his job with the mindset of, “I know I’m going to see new things, and I am going to learn about those things as quickly as possible.”
I don’t really know where I was going with this post. It wasn’t meant to be me stroking my own ego about how awesome I am at avoiding cliches. I mean, I’m not even that good at it. Most of Hellbound has cliches in it. All of my books do, really. But I have talked before about taking a cliche and making it your own, or at least reworking it some so it’s not so damn tired. So I wanted to present an example of that. And now I’ve started three sentences in a row with conjunctions.
Alright bye!
Word of the Day: Cessation (n) – a temporary or complete stopping; discontinuance
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