S. Worthen | Weblog

A thought on "stew": it's a decent solution to a problem of narrative economy. There's a need to show that the characters are eating something, but to go into lots of details of what they are actually eating would be a distraction from the plot. ("Lembas" serves a similar function in The Lord of the Rings.)

A writer can't avoid the cliché by picking a different foodstuff (just renames the cliché) or going into detail about how food is acquired and prepared (this distorts the story), or restructuring the story so that the question of "what on earth are the characters eating?" doesn't arise (this distorts the story even further). Neil Gaiman quotes an e-mail from a fan (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2002/10/morning-has-barely-broken-and-already.asp) who sums up the problem quite well:

Re: your journal entry on 22 October about "the cliches of Fantasy" - my question (rhetorical in my case, I suppose) is, isn't that sort of thing the reason most people READ Fantasy? Isn't that what they want and expect to read, variations on the theme of The Heroic Journey with the protagonist growing and finding out more about herself along the way? Or is it just me? I almost feel like apologizing for my tastes now, but if I didn't ENJOY that sort of thing I wouldn't be READING Fantasy books.

In other words, you can't avoid narrative clichés and still appeal to the audience that these clichés have evolved to appeal to!