On the beach, he put your earbud in his left ear, and you traced, with your eyes, the black wire that fell from the ear piece till it wove into your music player. Show him some classics, some of the Kinks, and 80’s new wave band Joy Division. Play him “While my Guitar Gently Weeps” while you gently taper off sand from the soles of your feet. At one point you tried to capture the movement of sand particles you cupped in your hands right before they were strained out of the nestled crevices between your fingers. They moved too fast, or perhaps your shutter speed was too slow, either way what came out in the photo was no more than focused fingertips and a blur of tans and golds that streamed from them. You could have called it art—could have created some type of metaphorical analogy on the blur of the sand and the focus of your fingers, and how all of it represented indeterminacies in human nature and fallacies of human kind, but you erased the photo. He liked your music, such a divergent from his, and asked for a playlist and you childishly excited yourself on the collection of Cream and Blue Oyster Cult that would be placed on it, not knowing that there would be no playlist, and that the last remnants of your beach trip would be in the left-over residue of sand on sandals.
Part of a fiction writer’s job is to make his/her work believable. To do so, a writer has to litter (and I mean litter like you love living in landfills) his or her work with specifics. Specific references to obscure names, specific references to places and memories that would only come to you from personal experience or anecdotal stories. Don’t be afraid to make references to things that others won’t understand (if they feel a good vibe from your work they’ll be inclined to look it up). Having specifics takes away the cliché aspect of a piece. Cliché’s are overly used generalizations, and with such striking specifics it’ll be near impossible to have your piece scrutinized for overuse of clichés.