Cliches, Tropes, and Stereotypes.

So your cast of characters consists of a pretty blonde mean-girl, a sassy black kid, a hot russian assassin, and a mad scientist. Your antagonist has a black curlicue mustache, and keeps kidnapping your protagonist's love interest because.. jealousy or something. Your protag. is a "Chosen One." And your plot twist is a fatal illness. These are all cliches, tropes, and stereotypes. And they do NOT belong in your story. You'll bore your reader to sleep.

So how do you fix this? You need to keep your assassin, or your scientist, or your jealous antagonist. And you can keep them. You just need to change them.

Let's use our hot russian assassin as an example. She's really cool, but since when does she need to be russian, or hot? If it's not integral to the plot that she's russian, like if the villain is a mythical russian creature that only she has information on, then she can literally be from anywhere. My assassin, for instance, is from an imaginary country in the Amazon rainforest. And if we don't need her to be attractive, why bother making her look good? She can have acne, scars (definitely scars), anything you like. 

Now you have an ugly, South American assassin. Boom, cliche solved. You can do this with all your cliched or trite characters or plots. Just a few changes are all you need to change an old idea to a fresh new one. 



And, because text can be boring, here's a picture that shows another example of breaking a stereotype.