On Cliché and the Reader-Writer Contract

A sure sign that a writer has yet to develop confidence in his or her use of language, and perhaps the most obvious, is the use of cliché. But which is worse: the unintended cliché, or the one deliberately used?
 A cliché used unintentionally, simply because the phrase has become so polished by popular use that it slips unnoticed through the beginning writer’s neural network, is just about forgivable – let’s call it a venial sin. A minor offence, and one more to be pitied than censured (is ‘more pitied that censured’ a cliché?); moreover, it’s a fault that can be easily remedied, providing the writer is willing to bear down and pay close attention, and be worthy of the words they choose.
 A cliché used deliberately, on the other hand, can only be regarded as the blackest of mortal sins. For the writer who chooses to employ hackneyed phrases, and with malice aforethought to boot, there can be no forgiveness nor redemption; for such writers there is only Dante’s inferno, suspended somewhere in the outer dark between levels seven (violence against neighbours and/or God) and eight (fraud and deception).
 The beginning writer, of course, might feel that this is all rather strong stuff, and that the occasional lapse into platitude might even be expected – there must be a reason, after all (possibly because they contain their kernel of truth), why clichés became clichés in the first place.
 The issue for the experienced reader, however, is overly familiar phrases are bum notes; and should they go clanging and banging about in our inner ear, we will immediately know that the writer-reader contract is being violated. Implicit in the writer-reader relationship is the idea that, should a reader choose to read a particular book, she will be offered a new way of seeing the world, or at the very least get a distinctive perspective on whatever subject the writer has chosen to offer. Clichés are the laziest kind of plagiarism, and a very strong hint that the writer is more interested in sounding like a writer than being an actual writer, which is to say delivering original insights derived from the writer’s unique take on the world.