Prone to Swoons: How Not to Write Cliche When You Are One

My brother punched me when I was four. I don’t hold it against him. I’d go on to bite and scratch my share of wild violence upon my siblings. But the time I’m thinking of resulted in something karmically frightening for my brother, trendsetting for me. After he punched me, I dropped like a sack and wet myself. He ran for my mom in a panic, and that’s how he became both the villain and hero of the story behind my first swoon.

A Rallying Cry for Chronic Escapism

There’s an oft-misappropriated Jane Austen quote that reads gorgeously like a rallying cry for chronic escapism: “Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint.”

In Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price whispers these words to her frosty bedroom window while looking down at a loitering Mr. Crawford, who’s basically holding a banner that reads “But I’m a Nice Guy” on the grounds below. Is Fanny cautioning or encouraging herself? Or is she speaking to the rakish and impetuous Mr. Crawford? As flattered as she is by his attentions, she’s already witnessed his insincerity toward Mariah! She knows she shouldn’t encourage him.

But the words never were Fanny’s in the books. They belonged to a character named Sophia from Austen’s early satirical work “Love and Freindship [sic].” Like Mrs. Bennet (Pride and Prejudice), Mr. Collins (P&P), the Mrs. and Miss Bates (Emma), and even, on occasion, Elizabeth’s father (P&P), Sophia is a caricature, a joke. Her purpose is to embody, in expert hyperbole, our collective quirks and idiocracies. By giving us something to laugh at in the form of her caricatures, Austen seems to advise on how not to be.

“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint.”

Sophia says it right before finally meeting the fate that took Colonel Brandon’s first love in Sense and Sensibility—death brought on by an overabundance of sensibility, the kind that cripples and self-defeats.

In the bathroom some recent years ago, I again dropped like a sack and wet myself. No precursory violence this time. I’d gotten up for a drink of water in the night and I blue-screened in front of the mirror, addled by a full day of beer and wine and a prolonged period of undereating. My body just didn’t have enough of what it needed to keep me conscious right then, overwhelmed as it had been many times before: after my wisdom tooth surgery, four-wheeling accident, childhood fever.

I swooned, as I have discovered myself prone to do.

“I shall conquer this! I shall!”

If you’re picturing a sweaty, post-fencing-practice Colin Firth right now, we’re probably already friends or should be. (Follow me!)

I have an untapped fondness for Jane Austen. I’m no expert, but I’ve been walking around with the feeling that I ought to be for a while now. She’s instructed me subliminally enough, like Mary Oliver’s “shadow-companions”; it’d be impossible to remove her from the pool of authors that have influenced my worldview. I aspired to be a writer like her, and for a long time I fancied myself an Elizabeth Bennet, witty and vivacious. Turns out I’m a splash of Lydia (P&P), too, and a heap of Marianne Dashwood (S&S).

I’m a cliché, crumpling as I did in a fragile swoon—from excess, from want—to be discovered damsel-in-distress style on the bathroom floor. Long-term Fiancé pleaded me back to consciousness, helped me into the tub. I called my mom. We might have been following the script of a Saved by the Bell episode, one of the serious ones that doubled as a D.A.R.E. ad.

I braced myself for the launch of this blog by starting on anti-anxiety medication a few weeks before, but for me an attack creeps up, first by leeching my appetite, then my sleep. On one such sleepless night I took myself out to the TV room, my heart having locked onto that desperate rhythm, the one that begs to be heard and won’t shut up. On the couch, my limbs began to buzz and lose their weight, a vibrating coolness touched my lips. I was going to throw up, pass out, or both. Emergency Xanax, I decided.

I slipped from the couch, keeping myself low to the tile in case I blue-screened again, and then butt-scooted to the kitchen. I didn’t pass out. I saved myself, calmed my heart, and slept.

***

I’ve brought you here under false pretenses. I don’t know if I have the answers to the “cliché” question—how not to write them. And it should be especially difficult if you, the author, have only cliché to draw from: your teen angst and pixie-dream-girl-wishes, your crushes and paralytic shyness, your acne and orthodontia, your wallflower blues and dances with trauma—the memories that stuck. They are no more valid, no more special than anyone else’s cliché, and no less worthy of Mary-Oliver-level attention, the kind that sits and waits, inventing a new way to say an ordinary thing.