A post at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group Blog: Using Tropes: The Good, the Bad, and the Amazing OR How To Upcycle Tropes and Keep Them Fresh
I like tropes. Or rather, I like tropes that I like, which is perfectly circular, but true. I don’t care whether a particular trope is common as dirt; if it’s well executed, then I’m going to enjoy it.
Tropes, of course, are story elements that been used so often across fiction that they’re instantly recognizable. These elements can be elements of plot or setting, or they can be character types. Used badly, they’re cliches and people roll their eyes. Used well, they are tropes and readers who like a specific trope probably aren’t going to get tired of it no matter how often they see it.
Tropes I like:
Prison breaks, schools, training, girls-disguised-as-boys, enemy-to-friend, found family, dragons, bodyguards, assassins (not too evil), thieves (not evil). I like loyalty and fealty.
Tropes I don’t like:
Time travel, prophecies, love triangles, the backstabbing friend, the chosen one, the lost heir, the irresponsible flighty idiot girl, the depressed detective. I loathe betrayal and humiliation.
Any back cover description that refers to a prison break immediately makes me perk up and look more carefully at the book, no matter the genre. Anything that involves time travel constitutes a bar that has to be overcome by other things, such as a strong recommendation from someone whose taste I trust.
I don’t think it’s really necessary to ask, “How do you keep a trope fresh?” I think the answer is always, “By being a good writer.” Nevertheless, fine, what does the linked post suggest in this regard?
What’s good about tropes, what’s bad about tropes … yes, yes, say something original … okay, here:
Sometimes we writers can get overly comfortable with a successful plotline, device, or character type, and before we know it, it’s going into every one of our stories. I have a favorite author who writes books with female protagonists who, for some reason, always end up accidentally pregnant at some point. Each book has different characters, motivations, and scenarios, but the same device is used in all of them. It started reading as inauthentic—a crutch for the author rather than a meaningful event for the character—and I found myself looking for other stories to read.
The reason this is interesting is, I wouldn’t say that this sort of thing is produced by an author who gets “overly comfortable with a successful plotline, device, or character type.” I would say that a repetitive element like this is produced by an author’s preoccupation with or interest in or preference for specific situations and themes. Oh, that’s reminding me of this:
This is a very good book, here are my comments about this novel, but my point is, the author says in an author’s note that she’s specifically interested in plagues … which could be added that to “plot elements I don’t like, actually, but she made it work. Anyway, if plagues crop up in her books, that’s not a result of her being overly comfortable with a worldbuilding element that is popular; that’s a result of her specific interest in plagues.
Anybody ever read a bunch of Jack Chalker novels? Ideally several series one after another? The Well World is quite fun. The Four Lords of Diamond didn’t appeal to me quite as much. I wound up rather disliking the Flux and Anchor series … my goodness, look at this price. I wonder if I still have these books on my shelf? If so, I should add a “rare and collectable” label to prevent myself from just dumping them in a used book store. Anyway, this is seven books, four books, five books. This is plenty to say the following:
Wow, Chalker keeps coming back to body distortion, involuntary personality restructuring, and sexual slavery of exaggeratedly feminized people. If it were just The Well World, that would be one thing. But it’s all of them. As a rule, the important characters wind up … fairly okay, at least. Honestly, I do like the Well World series. I’m pretty sure I still have those. But my point is, returning to those elements probably isn’t a matter of being comfortable with successful tropes. Those aren’t tropes — at least, I don’t think so. The repetition of these situations didn’t seem like a crutch to me at the time I read all these books, and still doesn’t. It doesn’t seem inauthentic at all. It seems to me to reflect a particular set of preoccupations that I don’t share and don’t like to read about.
If some author kept featuring characters who wound up unexpectedly pregnant, I wouldn’t think “easy reliance on a trope.” I would think, “preoccupation with this situation.”
The rest of the linked post is about varying the “hero’s quest” plot. Some of the variations seem so trivial they don’t count. Meeting up in a coffee shop rather than tavern, really? Others seem too far removed from the original to retain any hint of the actual trope: Â Horror: To survive and find freedom, the main character must sneak (unscathed) from the top floor to the ground level of a zombie-infested office building. I might well enjoy reading that, but it’s not a quest story any longer.
If I want to use a trope, I want the actual trope, sufficiently recognizable that I and readers can enjoy it . Someday, perhaps I’ll write a prison break story, with enemies-to-friends plus an assassin. That all seems like it could be made to fit a single novel.
Please Feel Free to Share:
It’s just occurred to me that you may enjoy one of my favorite finds from last year: D.K. Broster’s “Mr Rowl”, published in 1925 and set in 1813, about a captured French hussar imprisoned in England during the Napoleonic Wars who stages multiple prison breaks, some of which go better than others, the best of which involves him cross-dressing (mostly successfully) as a girl. Then there’s the enemies-to-friends with a British naval captain… It’s great fun, high drama, Romance in the old-fashioned capital R sense. Available for free at the Faded Page repository for out-of-copyright books: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150917
Not (exactly) a trope, but I’m pretty sure that in every single Garth Nix book that I’ve read, some character at some point must climb a ridiculous number of stairs – up or down. In fact, his Keys to the Kingdom series is all about towers, as is his The Seventh Tower series, and half of the books are about climbing stairs. I think the man has a phobia of long flights of stairs, or at least an unhealthy fascination – and it is hilarious to me. Very good writer, though, with wildly different settings for his series.
I, too, loathe love triangles, especially if it’s a girl helplessly failing to make a clear choice between two men, or two men refusing to abide by her choice. Bleah. Hate it.
Ooh! Instantly perked up at your suggestion of Broster’s story, Mary Beth! Thanks!
That’s funny, EC, especially once you get sensitized so you notice the stairs in all those stories!
A common element in CJC’s work is the one person who goes to live with or somehow winds up living among a population of very different people: Serpent’s Reach, Foreigner, Cuckoo’s Egg, the Mri trilogy, Fortress … I think the Union Alliance main stories are the only ones which don’t have that as an obvious element, but I think there are a couple examples even there. Not Cyteen, I don’t think.
There was one writer who eventually always worked the story around to lost or possibly dead children.
It’s the sort of thing that makes one wonder about what in the author’s life is behind those recurring elements.
Why does the name D.K. Browster sound so familiar? oh, Flight of the Heron, which was ubiquitous in the libraries I visited growing up. Somehow I never managed to read it, although I went through a very long ‘Scottish’ period. Downloading Mr. Rowl
@Elaine you’re the only person I’ve encountered who’s also heard of DK Broster! I liked “The Flight of the Heron” but enjoyed “Mr Rowl” far more, possibly because it was so uniquely tropey while also tackling a perspective I’d never encountered before—almost everything else I’ve read in a Napoleonic Wars setting has been from the English perspective. DK Broster was English herself, but with profound Francophile leanings. (She also wrote several novels & short stories following royalist partisans in the French Revolution, which I hadn’t known about either!)
Maybe not surprisingly, I can sort of tell when I really like an author’s ouvre. I too, want to read a prison break with enemies-to-friends and an assassin. Um, if you don’t read Lindsay Buroker, you should. Particularly the Emperor’s Edge (almost all the tropes you mentioned! you could include schools if you looked at the spin-offs).
Gender charades is probably the only one I don’t share with you, though maybe because it’s just rare outside YA (which I don’t read as much as I could). It’s up my alley otherwise, as I like fun charades and hate faked identity thanks to secondhand embarrassment and feeling like betrayal is lurking around every conversation. It’s OK if no one I care about is being fooled (with other charades). Anyway my other turn off is chronic miscommunication as a plot driver, so the charade kind of leads to that as well. Gender is probably an exception there, as it’s not your personality or history.
It occurs to me I also like prison break-ins rather than just escapes (though I doubt anyone wrote it outside the Six of Crows).
*Sorry, I meant to say I can tell we will share trope likes if I like the ouvre, generally. As opposed to some few of their works.
If you do it right, “coffee shop” would indeed change your world enormously. It would definitely be early modern, not medieval. Then, many writers make medieval eras so modern that it seems quite certain that they don’t really grasp that the past is different.
Elaine T.: Arguably Finity’s End, where the Pell-raised protagonist winds up perforce returned to the merchanter family he has no memory of, is at least akin. Josh Talley in Downbelow Station and Thomas Bowe-Hawkins in Tripoint are also fish out of water navigating unfamiliar cultures in stressful situations. Voyager in Night does it with three people. Sort of.
(I think it was Jo Walton who pointed out that another Cherryh go-to is having to deal with an ongoing succession of crises while never getting enough sleep.)
And 40,000 in Gehenna has it mostly happening offstage.
It’s actually a little surprising that she never did a Pell story that was “lost human going Downer” or Downer stowaway having to adapt to humans who don’t get hisa culture. But the hisa may be too idealized to use that way.
Impressed merchanter to Mazziani would also be a story to tell, but maybe a little too brutal and depressing. Even Norway wasn’t exactly overconcerned with the Geneva Conventions, before or after it realigned itself.
Vanye in the Morgaine books also has to keep readapting to new cultures, sometimes with Morgaine and sometimes separated from her, and that’s very technically in the Union-Alliance milieu. (At least to the extent that Ari Emory dispatched the expedition of which Morgaine is the last descendant/survivor.)
Reena, yes, I expect the ouvre correlates strongly with sharing a liking for certain tropes. I did read the Emperor’s Edge series, and guess why? Yep, assassin. I like that series quite a bit, which demonstrates that for me, a somewhat unbelievably cool assassin plus witty dialogue can make up for plotting that descends into silliness now and then.
Mary Catelli, I think I was reading it as “not getting that the past is different” more than “and thus the setting is modern.”
VERY technically, Mike! I didn’t realize Ari Emory sent out that expedition — where is that indicated?
I definitely agree about Finity’s End; also arguably Bet Yeager in Rimrunners. It’s harder to point at books where this element is truly absent than find justifications for including books where it kind of is.
Yes, Finity’s End definitely, and I considered Rimrunners, but it’s been long enough since I read it I wasn’t sure. Don’t like Downbelow Station so completely forgot about Josh Talley.
I think the bit about Ari sending the expedition (I wonder what number of iterations she was up to by that point?) may be in the graphic novel version. It certainly wasn’t in the novels I read. I used to have that graphic edition, but haven’t seen since we finished all the work on the house.
That it’s in the graphic novel is my memory too, and Jo Walton mentions it in a Tor review. The original novel just says Union Science Bureau.
One caveat is that I have the first issue of the original black and white comic, and Ari’s name’s not in there. But it may be in the later color edition published by Starblaze. The graphic novels are attributed only to Jane Fancher, but Cherryh says she was pretty involved, especially in the second, and was supposed to get a supporting credit that was inadvertently dropped.
I must admit, I had no idea there were graphic novel versions at all.
Josh Talley was REALLY minor. He’s one of those characters who is peripheral in the original, but would have made a great protagonist in a spinoff story.
I found his story pretty vivid, but DS has a lot of different storylines and viewpoint characters, so I probably overestimate how much actual on-stage time he has.
Though speaking of go-tos, Cherryh also *really* likes her dominant woman/submissive man pairings, often in situations where the latter’s options are very constrained (at least).
Tally also gets a walk-on in Merchanter’s Luck as an Alliance Security officer. (I was interested to see that Cherryh had the idea for that book initially, and Downbelow Station grew out of a perceived need to establish the setting for it.)
I totally missed Josh Talley as a walk-on! How about that!