Meeting and exceeding readers’ expectations
Tropes are devices that storytellers use again and again, because they work. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you’re writing with intention and have a fresh take. To the reader, tropes are the lingo of the genre, and they feel familiar, comfortable, and easy to understand. They can be a shortcut into immersion, and good plain fun, too. However, some can be overused or tired and may need freshening up. Some can fall out of favor, and some can even lead to instant one-star reviews.
What exactly is a trope?
In fiction writing, there are two kinds of tropes. In the academic sense, they’re figurative language, such as words, phrases or images, that is used repeatedly for artistic effect. The second kind, which I’ll talk about here, are the ideas that writers use again and again. Some people use trope and cliché interchangeably. I’d argue that a cliché is a trope that has become tired from overuse, whereas there are plenty of opportunities to use tropes in new ways, and that they can even help your writing.
Think of tropes as apples. If you ate nothing but apples every day, they’d get old fast (clichéd) but cut them up and put them in a pie, and suddenly they’re exciting again. Don’t write tropes off; they’re a valuable addition to any writer’s toolkit.
Common tropes in genre fiction
When a reader thinks about their favorite genre, they’re usually thinking about a collection of tropes that they enjoy. They might say, “I like crime thrillers” which means they like books with detectives, crimes, action sequences, sympathetic victims (and villains) and a certain tone. A reader might say, “I love books about cults that want to sacrifice the innocent protagonist to supernatural forces” or “I like plucky young heroes who need to save the world from a dystopian future.” Tropes are usually defined by their genre, although some tropes can cross over.
Readers like and expect tropes, but they like it even more when you subvert a trope by changing something or turning it completely on its head. We’re seeing a rise in gender-bent fairytales and the villain-as-protagonist because of this.
Science fiction tropes
Space pirates are fun and feature in plenty of great science fiction. From the Belter OPA pirates in The Expanse to over a hundred other books about space pirates in a single list on Goodreads, they’re fun, free, rude, and highly entertaining. They can be protagonists or antagonists.
Wormholes and their related subspace travel work fabulously as an interstellar shortcut, and the real-life research around black holes and dark matter is new enough that you can still get away with a fair amount of stretching the limits of plausibility. Star Trek Discovery freshens this trope by creating the mycelial network.
Clones are interesting to explore, especially with regard to notions of identity or even practical use. Need a spare organ? Print one. Need someone else to do the dishes that have been piling up since the start of lockdown? I’d love a clone for that. The ethical dilemmas are endless, which means plenty of opportunity for some hard decisions that will help your characters to grow. My favorite use of this trope is in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Barnes and Noble have a great list of more science fiction tropes here.
Fantasy tropes
Considering that fantasy encompasses the entire realm of the impossible, you’d expect that every story would be completely unique, without any similarities, right? Wrong. Ever since Grimm’s fairytales, fantasy writers have used the same tropes over and over, and they’re just as effective as they were hundreds of years ago. Here are three from books I love.
The Helpful Hermit in the Woods: The hero wanders lost in the forest and comes upon a cozy cottage where they rest for a while and get some key insights into their quest. Hansel and Gretel shakes this up: the helpful old lady is a cannibal. You might also spot this trope in Lord of the Rings.
The Prisoner with Stockholm Syndrome: Since Beauty and the Beast, we’ve seen the trope of the princess or hero who is exiled, trapped, or otherwise imprisoned, only to fall in love with their captor. We see this in the fabulously successful A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J Maas. There’s something intriguing about seeing the weak victim becoming strong and the gruff captor being softened and changed by their influence. This isn’t one of my favorite tropes to be honest, as I find the whole idea a bit squicky, but it makes for good reading and bestsellers so I’ve included it.
Good Versus Evil: Naomi Novik does a great job subverting this key trope, which features so heavily in almost every fantasy novel, in Uprooted. The big bad wolf, the evil queen, the dark wizard, and the plucky heroes who need to defeat them. Another great story that subverts this trope so well that it was turned into one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time is Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
Here are some more fantasy tropes you can play with.
Cross-genre tropes
Some other tropes you’ll see in many books, which are made even better by being subverted, reimagined, tweaked or turned on their heads, are the following:
- The love triangle: gripping enough for Twilight fans to still argue about whether they’re Team Jacob or Team Edward.
- The bickering sidekicks: Ron and Hermione bicker throughout the Harry Potter series, adding some great comic relief.
- Found families: sometimes the fellowship we choose is better than the family we have lost, or who have rejected us. Sometimes our found family consists of our enemies, like Arya Stark and the Hound from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Now that’s what I call subverting a trope!
Tropes to avoid
These are the ones that make readers recoil in disgust and leave nasty reviews on your Amazon listing. Don’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.
- Sexual assault as character development is never okay.
- It was all a dream is boring and frustrating and cheats your reader out of a well-tied-up ending.
- Killing off all/only the diverse representation defeats the purpose of having diverse representation in the first place.
- Deus ex machina, where an unlikely savior suddenly appears and resolves all the issues.
- Tits on legs, where women are described purely using their extremities, outfits, hair and how sexually appealing they are. Some male characters also suffer from this.
Use them or lose them?
Considering that since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440, over 130 million books have been published, it is unlikely that anything you write will ever be completely different from other books in its genre. There are bound to be similarities, and that’s because tropes make for good storytelling. They work. The secret to using tropes successfully is to subvert them, tweak them, or put them together in new combinations. A love triangle between a sentient AI, an imprisoned prince, and a hermit in the woods? I’d read that!
Walking the fine line between tropes and clichés
One of the many things I do in my role as a developmental editor is to assess whether your story is meeting the expectations of readers who are fans of the genre. This means seeing if your love story has a happy ending, or if you’ve left enough breadcrumbs for amateur detectives to figure out who did it in your whodunnit mystery. I can help you to distinguish between a creatively used trope and a tired cliché.
