They say the devil is in the details and cliches can often stick out like a sore thumb. While some author slip-ups can be solved with a simple search/replace, it’s nearly impossible to hunt down cliches. After all, there may be dozens of them lurking in your manuscript and they don’t reveal themselves easily.
Cue Marlowe and her newest trick — spotting cliches (and counting their number of uses) in your novel. I’ve written two dozen novels, but I still cringed at the thought of what the new artificial intelligence from Authors A.I. might uncover in my award-winning suspense novel, The Ghostwriter.
Here’s what Marlowe found:
The cliche finder wasn’t part of the beta version of Marlowe, but after several authors suggested it, Matthew Jockers — Marlowe’s creator — coded it up and now it’s one of the most popular features in the A.I. report.
Marlowe has a library of more than 800 cliches and growing. As with all of the feedback in her critiques, authors are free to act on her insights — or not. Cliches are especially tricky. You probably don’t want to remove every instance from your novel — in some ways, cliches can serve as the common parlance of our day. But you don’t want to load down your work with too many. Decide on the right balance yourself.
Want to know if cliches have wound their way into your work? Run a Marlowe report on your novel and get her results within 15 minutes.
Marlowe is a fiction-loving A.I. editor who can read your novel and deliver a comprehensive 25-page report on its plot, structure, pacing and characters. Our members get two reports a month, or single purchases are available. Click here for details.
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