Brakes Only Fail on Hills and Other Action Cliches

So here's the thing...I love, LOVE action and suspense. A requirement for my movie-going experience is that something blows up and there are car chases, gunfire, and some form of fight scene in which furniture is used as weapons. Yeah, my husband is totally lucky.


I also write Romantic Suspense...so in my books there are lot of emotions and drama and angsty relationship stuff, but there are also a lot of thrills.  What I don't want is for those scenes to be "done before" and therefore not at all entertaining.


So I've made a list of things that happen in movies and books...scratch that, ALMOST EVERY MOVIE or BOOK...scenes that I should avoid at all costs. Lets start out with the little annoying things...

Photo by San Diego Shooter.

If the heroine is in a nature setting and an animal attacks, she will be the only one the predator goes for despite the fact that there are multiple Sherpas, bad guys lurking in the bushes, and a love interest within inches of her.


Raging river rapids are no match for the speed of the hero despite rough terrain as he is always able to run alongside the person being swept away and in fact...get ahead of them, find a tree that has fallen exactly halfway across the water, and fashion a rescue loop in time to pluck them to safety.

Photo by Greggoconnel.

Bad guys always kill someone in front of giant picture windows with open drapes. Especially when the heroine is jogging by or bird watching and accidentally happens to look at said window with binoculars or a camera.
Corollary to this rule is that her face is always brightly lit by lightning or passing car headlights to give the villain a proper look at her.

Random hot guy in glasses.

Super sexy heroes never have glasses. They never squint, hold secret evidence files at arms length to read them, and they can always decipher-pronounce obscure words even if they are in a different language or from a magical realm.


Intercourse is possible with any sentient being from any corner of the universe/realm/magical species because they all are physically identical to humans -- except hotter. They also fall in love instantly, for very specific reasons, for eternity even if they have just glanced at the heroine.

Photo by Wonderlane.

All bombers abide by the international color codes for wires so that the hero/heroine knows which wire to cut. The exception to this rule is of course, if the hero/heroine is in fact a bomb expert...then the bomb is "something they've never seen before" and the wire they cut makes the time go faster.


If your brakes fail, you MUST be either in San Francisco during some sort of protest or on winding dark mountain cliff roads where you will end up dangling with two tires teetering over a deadly drop...otherwise the hero cannot find and rescue you just as a bird lands on the bumper and causes the car to fall and explode. 

Heroes must always be intimately acquainted with every street, access road, and "secret shortcut" of any city they are in despite having never visited before. They must also be able to navigate dark and defunct boiler rooms below street-level with nothing but a lighter and a keen sense of hearing.

Secret dynamo.

All hackers are antisocial, pierced/tattooed, have strange or ironic hairdo's and are secret dynamos in the sack.


Okay, that one is actually probably spot on...>


Those are some of my favorite action/thriller cliches...do you have any that just irritate you? How about some fallacies that really pull you out of the book and make you roll your eyes?


Until next time...Go Write!

First photo by o5com.