A sage old journalist once gave me a very smart definition of the cliché: if you're writing something and have one word pop in your head only to be followed immediately by another that oh-so-wants to sit alongside it then the chances are you're about to write a cliché.

Ah, the wisdom of age, to use a timeworn phrase (see what I mean?) Simple cliches are best avoided. In the course of a 120,000 words or more book it's going to be damned hard to avoid the juxtaposition of some words that a few people will regard as cliched, mind. I try to avoid the more obvious ones using the trick above -- if it seems so natural you can't wait to write it there's probably a reason, and it's rarely a good one.

But the cliché goes beyond mere words. There's cliched thinking and structure too, and here the waters get a little murky.

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Stories have a certain structure -- loosely a beginning, a middle and an end. Some writers decry this as old-fashioned nonsense and invent their own rules. They're entitled to do this and good luck to them. It's not what I'm discussing here, which is plain, simple narrative.

The traditional story has a form which is understood by both writers and readers. You could consider it a cliché -- some people do. To me it's more an agreed conspiracy between the storyteller and the audience, one that predates writing and goes back to the birth of oral storytelling. It involves setting up a narrative that draws in the listener/reader, engrossing him with its richness and the characters involved and then, after a certain number of diversions, bringing the whole thing to some kind of close.

Is that a cliché? Possibly, but it's one that, in general terms, you challenge at your peril. On a simple event-by-event, scene-by-scene basis you can try my wise old hack's rules. So if a man walks in bearing a gun it may be logical that something violent is about to happen. Does that mean you should search for another outcome? Possibly. It depends. Some writers try to be extra smart by bilking the expected constantly throughout a book. They set up a scene and then come up with some completely unexpected denouement.

That's fine, but I suspect you need to do it judiciously. If every single expectation is defeated readers may well begin to sniff a gimmick. They are investing their own intelligence in the narrative too. If you tell them each time round they're wrong they may grow resentful and bored.

One of the most interesting comments you get from readers is when they say, 'I saw that coming!' Or the opposite, 'I never expected that.' I suspect that readers want to have <em>both</em> reactions from a book. Parts of it they want to feel they predicted, while other elements are there to surprise them. If you give them all of one or the other they will, eventually, be disappointed.

How do you do that? In a way through the cliché. Managing the expectation of readers is closely tied to your willingness to do the obvious from time to time, sparingly and with a degree of firm control. Shun it altogether and you're a smartass. Do it too heavily and you're a magician whose secrets are visible to all.

The biggest expectation -- or cliché if you like -- is that of resolution. Readers <em>hate</em> unresolved narratives even though real life is chock full of them. In standard, popular storytelling you can't leave a novel hanging entirely in the air in the final scene. That does <em>not</em> mean people have to walk off into the sunset or get dead. Resolution is not the same as conclusion. A story can be resolved by a simple change in character, a revelation in one individual that will change his or her outlook for the unseen future to come. You don't have to wrap up everything if you don't want to. What's important is that people feel some kind of end point has been reached.

If you're writing a series you probably want that end point to have threads dangling loosely too. Like most writers my series began with a book I thought was a standalone. I had vague feelings <em>A Season for the Dead</em> could start a series but was, thankfully, pushed into it by an insightful editor who said, 'I think Nic Costa has got more stories to tell.'

She was right, but that doesn't mean there isn't a resolution at the end that book. It's what readers expect. No one wants the old cliché. But they're always looking for the new one.