Author: Kelly Caldwell

My grandmother Eleanor (who you might remember from my letter awhile back about her broccoli-cheese casserole) was the person who taught me the expression, “It takes all kinds.”

It’s an abbreviation of the longer saying, “It takes all kinds to make up the world.” And Grandma loved it, because to her the world was a vibrant place full of interesting people she couldn’t wait to chat up at Jewel. When I was a bratty 13-year-old saying, “Look at that hair!” or “What is that weirdo doing?”, Grandma would tell me to be less judge-y and more open by saying, “It takes all kinds.”

“Just imagine how boring this world would be,” she’d say, “if everyone were exactly like you, or me!”

This is really good advice for judge-y 13-year-olds, and writers, too. It reminds us to be open to the strangeness of the world, and the people who make it interesting.

But also, it doesn’t go far enough. Because “it takes all kinds” is what psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliché.”

A thought-terminating cliché is one that immediately wraps things up, a little too neatly, so that no one probes any deeper. Think of phrases like “It’s always darkest before the dawn” or “It is what it is.”

They can be dangerous, Lifton wrote, because they “compress the most far-reaching and complex of human problems into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

Already you can imagine all kinds of scenarios where this would be disastrous for a writer. A character says, “All things must pass,” and brings a funeral scene to an abrupt, unsatisfying end. An essayist takes 2,000 words to explore their family’s experiences with immigration, starting fresh, and loneliness, but ends with, “A stranger in strange land.”

Last month, I wrote that it’s OK to let clichés flow into our early drafts, as long as we go back and weed them out. We need to keep an especially watchful eye out for thought-terminating clichés. Because when they show up, we should ask ourselves, “What are you avoiding?”

Probably something uncomfortable. But important.

Once, Grandma and I together watched a story on the evening news about men who observed Good Friday by re-enacting Christ’s crucifixion, complete with having themselves actually nailed to crosses. I must’ve said something like, “That’s nuts,” because Grandma put her hand on mine and said with such tenderness, “It takes all kinds, honey. Remember that.”

She died five years ago, so I cannot ask her what she really thought of the penitents and their devotion. Did Gram, a lifelong Catholic, imagine those men getting closer to their faith? Or did she think perhaps they only brought themselves closer to the cruelty of the world?

Clichés happen. Next time you see one, though, don’t let it shut you down. Do what I wish I’d done with Grandma—ask for more.

Kelly Caldwell,

Dean of Faculty

Baltimore and San Francisco have Food Czars. London has a Night Czar. In New York City, recently, we’ve got a Czar too: a Rat Czar, whose sole mission is to eradicate unwanted vermin.
 
I, too, have been similarly single-minded in advocating for eradication. And I’m not alone. Writing teachers, the authors of craft books, and apparently the editor in chief of The Atlantic—we’ve all vowed to rid the world of the scourge of clichés.
 
And look, we’re not wrong. Clichés —sayings so overused they’re flatter than the wonton wrappers on the spring rolls I over-ate Friday night — suck the fresh air out of your writing. They make it stale.
 
So we shouldn’t be surprised when our fellow writers read their own stories and are dismayed to discover phrases like “time heals all wounds,” “dumb as a box of hair,” or “bright as a shooting star.” In class, students beat themselves up if just one slips into their work after a 10-minute writing exercise.
 
Here’s the thing: When we’re telling you to exterminate clichés, we mean in the final draft.
 
Sometimes, early on, it’s OK to let the rats into your kitchen, so to speak.
 
Because clichés can be our friends.
 
I don’t have research to back this up, so this might end up being the most crack-potty of my many crackpot hypotheses, but I believe that clichés are signals from our subconscious. They’re surveyors’ stakes, saving your place so that when you’ve finished pouring out your story, you find your way back to where rich deposits of meaning lay buried, and dig.
 
Let’s say you write in an early draft “slippery as a fish.” Perhaps your subconscious wants you to stop and smell the slime. Maybe it wants you to consider why a character can’t hold what’s slippery. Perhaps it’s figurative, and the reason something is hard, or elusive, is critical to your story.
 
A cliché like that is doing you a favor, as long as you don’t let it linger.
 
The late comedian and author Bob Smith once gave me a page from a draft of his novel Remembrance of Things I Forgot. Bob was trying to work out one sentence, describing a character’s smile. And instead of deleting each attempt that he rejected, he kept them, filling a single-spaced page of all of his misfires. Several of those early tries are straight up clichés. Real clunkers, too. We’re talking banana peels and ice skates.
 
But as you read, you can see Bob zeroing in on the clichés, pulling them apart, writing fresh takes in the same vicinity, until, finally, he arrives at the just-right one. Take a look here, and you’ll see what I mean.
 
It’s how we should all approach clichés. It’s not about keeping the rats out of the kitchen. It’s about being vigilant, and not letting them get too comfortable.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

My friend and I are planning a beach vacation together, and lately, our giddy-anticipation texts back and forth have been fixated on one thing: Getting sand in our sunscreen.
 
We’re stupidly excited about whether the sand will be the coarser kind that, when it mixes with your kefir-like SPF 50, magically transforms into a sugar-scrub exfoliant they sell at Lush for $30 a pop. Or maybe it’ll be that baking-powder like sand, and hey, remember that time we tried that sunscreen that allegedly didn’t come off on your clothes? It was the consistency of ranch dressing, and with that soft, powdery sand everywhere, applying it was like rubbing melting gummy worms to your forearms.
 
There’s nothing like touch, is there?
 
Writers tend to neglect the sense of touch in our stories, (and smell, too!), preferring the flashier, sometimes easier senses of sight, sound, and taste.
 
Our stories suffer for this oversight —and not only because we ignore a wealth of material.
 
Did you know your body has two separate systems for processing touch? Your discriminative touch system tells you whether that fluttery brush of dune grass grazed your knee or your thigh. It’s what tells you whether it tickled or whether it itched.
 
Your emotional touch system doesn’t care much about where or how, but who. When the touch comes from a loved one, or is unwelcome, or satiates your skin hunger, your emotional touch system sends an entirely different set of messages to your brain. It’s the system that makes touch essential in bonding one human to another.
 
When we do remember touch, we tend to go for one system or the other, the discriminative one, more often than not. But look what happens when you invoke both, as Yusef Komunyakaa does in these lines from “Lust:”
 
He longs to be
An orange, to feel fingernails
Run a seam through him.
 
Frequently we don’t get granular enough. We’ll describe something as “smooth,” and move on.
 
Observe: Take off your shoes and feel the floor beneath your feet right now. (Unless you’re on the subway!) Now change rooms, and do it again. Both floors may be smooth, or carpeted. But they’re not the same, right? The waxy finish of your parqueted living room is not the same kind of smooth as your unyielding, chilly kitchen tile.
 
With touch, be choosy with your details and words, and profligate in your brain networks. And remember, simile and metaphor are your friends:
  
I can’t read the River, can’t see my hand
when it plunges elbow-deep
               to feel the cool against
                            the Mississippi heat—
            hot as a dog’s mouth.                       

 –January Gill O’Neill, “The River Remembers:”

Your turn. Write about two best friends, barefoot and outdoors, and start the story with touch.

Kelly Caldwell,

Dean of Faculty