Years ago, a girlfriend and I had a ritual: We would get take-out from the Boston Market restaurant, and then we would take it home and eat dinner while watching a movie we rented from Blockbuster (later, of course, the kids would coin the phrase “Netflix and chill” to describe this, since “Boston Market and Blockbuster” never caught on).

I especially loved Boston Market’s creamed corn. It was like a spoonful of heaven. At first, sharing a small container was enough. But I became addicted, such that it took more and more each time to bring me the same amount of pleasure. The small container wasn’t enough. It had to be a medium, and then the medium wasn’t enough, it had to be the large. Things got so bad at the end that I didn’t even care about any of the other Boston Market foods, I just wanted the creamed corn.

There was no hope for me. I was chasing the dragon.

(For those of you who are not familiar with the phrase “chasing the dragon,” it comes from the world of heroin, and it means that the second high is never as good as the first one, so once you get hooked you are forever chasing something you can never obtain.)

Here’s what this has to do with your pitches: When you are using the BMG (boy meets girl) story structure, or doing anything word-related for that matter, you are always in danger of resorting to cliche. Cliche is the word equivalent of chasing the dragon: The underlying idea might still be good, but the description of it has gotten stale, so the underlying idea goes stale, too. And things tend to get worse and worse, until no one is listening anymore. The cliche is forever wanting to be the full-of-life description that it once was but never will be again.

A key sign you are chasing the dragon in the world of words is what I call “vocabulary inflation.” “Make” becomes “craft,” “attractive” becomes “beautiful,” etc. You’ve gotten lazy with your ideas, and now you’re trying to use fancy words to cover up for the fact that your idea well has run dry.

A tip for not falling into this trap: Go specific. Mention things only your customer would know about. Mention that the open floor plan is causing a near-revolt in Marketing, or that the breakdown of the XYZ machine would bring the whole production line to a halt.

In BMG, it’s especially important that you avoid cliche in the first (upward) leg, and in the second (downward) leg. Cliche in the first leg will blunt the dopamine hit (and starting with a dopamine hit is the whole point of that leg), and cliche in the second leg will cause your customer to think “these people don’t understand me,” which defeats the main purpose of that second leg.