Is It Cliche If Your Character Is On The Run

What's a good, non-cliché way for my characters to meet?

The cliche is to have dramatic meetings where a new student instantly becomes fast friends with a total stranger.

Run through your own friendships. How did you meet them? They lived next door? Your parents hang out with theirs? You get introduced by another acquaintance, who casually knows you're the two people in town who like punk rock. Most people you now know, you met through someone else. So have something simple like a next door neighbor who is forced to invite one of them along by his parents and then ignores them at a party or wherever the town's kid's hang out. A team mate invites the new kid along to a party, because he's inviting the whole team. The kid then casually chats her up.

Start with your own life. Take a good look at your present friendships and past ones. What made something click with those? What made one stick and one didn't?

Are swords and daggers as the main character's weapons to cliche (for fantasy)?

Not really as there are only a limited number of weapons, and they just happen to be most convenient/lightest, pre gun powder.

Ok, I am doing this again: Do you think that this character is a Gary Stew (male version of a Mary Sue)?

Yes, this man is still a Gary Stew. Granted, he's rich, handsome, intelligent, etc... he still has the cliche' fault of being a d-bag to everyone. Give him some type of other flaws instead of the obvious ones. The last name being Forbs is too painfully obvious granted his financial situation and the fact that he's accomplished so much all the while being an extreme introvert is pretty far-fetched in my opinion. If you've studied a lot of CEO's you'd realize they're extremely extroverted and borderline sociopaths... unless he inherited the company?

Just take it back to the drawing board and create a more believable character or else people are going to stop reading the book. I'm not trying to be mean but I think if you're going to pour your heart into something, it'd be best if the audience didn't put the book down because they've seen the protagonist a thousand times before.

I hope this helps.
Best wishes in creating your character,
~Payam

How do you feel about LGBT characters in YA fiction with straight main characters?

Thank you for all of the comments so far. Beth and Crow I agree with you that LGBT characters should be real. I have a family member and a few friends who are gay and it just feels realistic to me for there to be gay characters in stories since I have them in my life. (I plan to run my story by them, but none of them are big readers so that's why I wanted to get some feedback from some book lovers.)

I'm all for LGBT characters being leads in stories, but as I'm straight I'm not sure if I could write a gay lead completely realistically (yet). I do have some stories where the lead is a boy, and I am obviously not, so anything is possible.

Lynn, I appreciate your comments as well. I in no way mean to show through my story that homosexuals are superior to heterosexuals, just that they are people just like heterosexuals (regardless about how others feel about how they live their lives).

There are teens out there who are LGBT and I wanted to look at what it might mean to

Ways to kill off a parent character in a story?

In a story that I'm currently writing, the main character lives with her father and stepmother of five years. Her mother died approximately seven years before the story takes place, when the character was eight. I'm having a little trouble with this because it was a sudden, unexpected death of a woman in her early thirties.

I had originally planned for the mother to have died in a car accident, but killing parents off in car accidents seems to be a little overused lately. Also, I don't think that the death would be very violent, since the main character doesn't angst over her mom's death very often.

Other than a long-term illness or ailment, what are some realistic and non-cliched ways to kill a character? Or would a car accident be alright?