Harry Potter: Cliche

I love Harold Bloom. In fact, sometimes I think of him as my Uncle Harry, though no familial relation exists between us. Bloom is, without question, one of the most respected voices in literature, but when it comes to Harry Potter, he's anything but a fan.

In a scathing Wall Street Journal article, the critic slams the J.K. Rowling books, saying, "Can more than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? Yes, they have been, and will continue to be for as long as they persevere with Potter." According to Bloom, Harry Potter is the poster-boy of an enormous "dumbing-down" in our society.

After reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Bloom voiced the two following grievances:

1. The book, he says, is not well written. Rowling's prose style is "heavy on cliche" and "makes no demand upon her readers."

2. It lacks "authentic imaginative vision"

Yet, from a marketing standpoint, what can we learn from Bloom's critique?

Like countless other authors, Rowling feeds the public's "hunger for unreality," but by incorporating cliche words and ideas into her novels, she makes Harry Potter particularly accessable to readers, both children and adults. Because of her reader-friendly writing style, Rowling can make sales.

Such is the great dilemma in fiction writing. Every author wants to make big sales, and every author wants to write timeless literature. But an author can't usually do both. Consider the Modern Library's list of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Absent from this list are Michael Crichton, Stephen King, James Patterson, and every other New York Times best-selling author.

Rather, the Modern Library's top five are Ulysses by James Joyce, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, Lolita by Valdimir Nabokov, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. All of these books, as far as I know, have never been best-sellers and, in fact, had only small circulations before the death of their authors.

If you so desire, how can you incorporate cliche into your own writing?