How to use tropes in your writing: an interactive workshop

Workshop

Learning to use tropes - Robby Badgley

  • Commedia dell’arte - Italian Theatre - character archetypes consistent from play to play (anyone who knew the tropes could understand what was going on)
  • Trope = recurring plot device, incident, character type we see over and over again in storytelling mediums
  • Trope = fundamental building block of storytelling, a shortcut to connect with an audience
  • Can be used to set and subvert expectations
  • Tropes are loved and hated
  • Tropes exist in every story!

Tropes

  • prop or item associated with an archetype or idea
  • behavior, relationship, character personality
  • story beat or plot point
  • whole plot (hero’s journey)
    • a famous story structure, a 12-point thing (like Star Wars)
    • protagonist rejecting the call to adventure and choosing to go on it anyways

Famous tropes

  • Checkhov’s Gun
    • if you introduce a gun, the gun has to shoot someone or something
  • Macguffin
    • an item that everyone is concerned with (LoTR, the ring)
  • Enemies to lovers
  • Damosel in Distress
  • Unreliable nearrator (voice of your story lying to the audience)
  • Criminal code of ethics
  • literary metaphors
  • Cavalry arrives to save

Around the Room

  • Name, what you want to write about, a trope
  • Steve Jenkins - memoir/family story or a western - fish out of water
  • Michael Moore - SF - hotblooded hero
  • CC Greystone - Fantasy - starcrossed lovers
  • Gene - not sure what to write yet - like SciFi stories
  • Dan Sitton - annual event that occurs every year - horror movies, making the obviously wrong decision
  • Niraj - extended relative diagnosed with cancer (emotional, quite the story) - terminal diagnosis, love my family without medical intervention
  • Daniel - fantasy/SF - somebody thinks they can manipulate it - destiny is like a tornado, you can lasso it, but it will blow you away
  • Katie - continuing cozy fantasy - rivals to lovers
  • Meagan - upmarket gothic fantasy with romantic subplots
  • Tim Yao - Twisted Westerns short stories - a bad guy who chooses to reform himself
  • Amy Hofmockel - working on the dragon point of view - a kid and their dragon
  • Lorraine Caulton - just exploring right now, not doing serious writing, son giving prompts
  • Gertrude - working on nonfiction book - Chekhov’s gun (reverse Chekhov’s gun - establishing the gun before it is used)

Consider a metaphor

  • Trope = a rock in the climbing wall
  • they guide a reader’s journey

Aren’t tropes bad?

  • They can be unoriginal and bad or inventive.
  • Don’t overdo it!
  • Use tropes to set the foundation of what you want to do; put a spin on a trope, make it your version of it.

Genres

  • Romance
    • romance markets itself by its tropes
    • e.g., hockey romances
    • people have an a la carte experience using tropes
  • Mysteries
    • You are playing a game of cat and mouse with the reader, setting them with information to keep them guessing
    • Tropes can condense character bios
    • you can use a trope to set expectations
    • readers feel clever for applying their outside knowledge
  • Horrow
    • Nothing is allowed to be nice; pending doom twists things
    • relies on execution of tropes “Don’t go in there!”
    • genre is there to hurt the character and you (tension seeps into the back of your neck)
    • choice of victims in horror is commentary

Structure tropes

  • How a story is built
  • Hero’s Journey
  • In Medias Res
  • Exposition Dump - can turn off some readers
  • Deus Ex Machina - solving an unfixable problem with a surprise object, character, or event
  • MacGuffin - object around which the plot revolves

Feelings

  • Most people don’t care about tropes (depends on the author, not on the trope)

Popular Tropes (survey)

  • Unreliable narrator
    • very difficult to pull off
    • Gone Girl
    • Final Fantasy VII
    • Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
  • found family (people not related by blood who come together to form a cohesive group of people by end of story)
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  • Enemies to lovers / rivals to lovers (not the same)
  • The chosen one
    • The Last Avatar

Loathed tropes (survey)

  • Unreliable narrator
  • Chosen one
  • enemies to lovers
    • romantansy boom (abusive guys, girl is a doormat)
  • “It was all a dream”
  • time travel
    • time-traveling ghosts (the ghost who was haunting you was you all along)
    • 112263
  • distopian future / post nuclear war
  • multiverse
  • If you like something, do it! It can be done well.

Bad tropes done well

  • Inception - compelling twist on “it was all a dream”
  • Throne of Glass - Aelin losing her powers was handled well
  • Lord of Light - god of death who felt more like an empowered mortal than an aloof entity
  • Moulin Rouge - dying person hiding their sickness was well executed
  • shapeshifters - Mystique vs Skrulls (shift their mass)
  • character has amnesia at the start - Nine Princes in Amber

Good trope done poorly

  • enemies to lovers (but not enemies)
  • The Fury - bad unreliable narrator
  • Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
  • The Last Murder at the End of the World - poorly done amnesia trope
    • over-extends the trope (forget things you couldn’t figure out)
  • Six Wakes (SF Murder Mystery) - people are killed but a clone with a copy of their consciousness wakes up - not amnesia but a lapse in their memory banks
  • Love triangle - Sara Jay Moss doesn’t do it well.

The tithgtrope

  • pit of cliche (fun but predictable–story is nothing but tropes) vs. the pit of too-clever-by-half (twisting yourself in knots to avoid tropes–this is worse)
  • Don’t overthink it–consider why you like these things and then do that.
  • Trope - writer;‘s voice’

Recommendation

  • Trope Talks - series on youtube by Overly Sarcastic
    • deep dive with 108 videos of how different media cover tropes

Tinker time

  • brainstorm a trope you’re interested in your story
  • zombies, vampires, hero being trained to be better
  • good anti-hero (guy questions if he is a good person)
  • good chosen one
  • fish out of water (transplant into the civil war)
  • Meagan - working on a historic gothic fantasy (83K –> 100K by end of November)
    • “they want them shorter and shorter these days” - Fantasy used to be 100-130K (but they want it to be closer to 110K words) - expense of paper and materials
    • teens - can’t keep their attention
    • average literacy rate has gone to 5th grade (we want it closer to 8th grade - foreshadowing, literary devices)
  • super robots, big robots
    • main character (started as a teen, now 30 years old) coming back to train other teenagers
  • Darkest hour trope
    • Avengers Endgame movie (just Captain America standing alone – great example of the lowest point)
    • LoTR movie - Sam and Frodo hit a point where it is just too hard to continue; Sam approaches it finding a glimmer of hope; Frodo just needs to get the job done
  • Avoiding the sad and depressing end (conservative guy buys a motorcycle and rides around the country and stops the nuclear bomb - a bucket list)
  • Revenge stories
    • digging two graves
    • easy to lose your way
    • revenge isn’t what it is cracked up to be
    • Kill Bill / Blue Eye Samurai
  • Fish out of water –> Twisted Western for the Civil War
    • East coast northerner transplanted into the western

Writer’s Voice as a filter for tropes?

  • Some writers can do anything with a trope and people at lesat like it.
  • Mistborn (Brian Sanderson) - he is a readable author, with plain language, approachable for the weird magic system he has built
    • magical heist book (genius master planner, group muscle, rogue with a code of conduct) - still enjoyable in the adventure
    • execution can just do something faithfully and well

Pantsing vs. Planning

  • Katie: I don’t plan the tropes, just write.
  • Robby: Have a list of minor characters–want the reader to get familiar with them. Looked at each role and figured out the character archetype (a dozen of the people) - pick up quickly what these people are about without having to explain their backstory.
    • the hook then is in the reader’s mind about who they are
    • but most people don’t think about it consciously
  • Journey to the West
  • Techniques of the Selling Writer - Dwight Swain
  • Writing for Emotional Impact - Karl Iglesias
  • Bird By Bird Anne Lamont
  • Save the Cat writes a Novel
  • Tuesday - writing display - writing books

Ethical use of AI

  • Traditional publishing houses don’t want chatgpt writing anything you have written
  • Ethical use of AI
    • Advanced search engine
    • Grammarly or ProWritingAid
  • Don’t use the generative aspect of AI
  • Artists and authors are very anti-AI

em-dash

  • AI uses em-dash correctly
  • Ted Talks use the em-dash to make things more dramatic

oxford comma

  • I went to lunch with my parents, Elton John, and Brittany Spears
  • I went to lunch with my parents, Elton John and Brittany Spears
  • does’t count against your wordcount

Writing Journey

  • 7 months of the year, we have general meetings with workshops; one recently covered use of AI with writing
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