Imagine this story. One of the main characters is traveling to
some castle and comes across a woman. We
the audience know that she is the other main character, the Queen who was travelling
amongst her people and got lost, or something.
They start heading to the castle, and have some adventures on the way,
and the Queen falls for the other character.
She finally works up the courage to tell them who she is, just as they
crest a hill and see a dragon rampaging over her castle. Interrupting someone just before they can
tell a big secret is dramatic, but it has been done so often it’s now
cliché. You can probably think of a
couple examples from movies or TV shows without straining too much.
Another example of cliché
timing is how someone will be explaining their backstory, or some key aspect of
world building, and just as they finish – sometimes within seconds – an alien
will burst out of the wall for an action scene.
On one hand, having action scenes in between all the exposition dumps is
an efficient way to give all the necessary information without it being too
much, but on the other hand we’ve also seen that a thousand times before.
Cliché timing is an
efficient way to give the readers needed information and to keep some tension
for the sake of drama, but it also makes it easy for the reader to see the scaffolding
the story is hung from. And when the
reader can see the structure of the story, it becomes harder for them to get
lost in it. Some cliché timing can help
the story, but too much can leave the reader rolling their eyes.
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Image from Pixabay.
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