It’s been a long time since my last post, but I’ve been easing back into writing fiction on the regular and have also had some interesting conversations with other creatives over the last few months, and all of that mixed together has given me some thoughts to share. Something I’m experiencing a major perspective shift about, as a writer, is the use of tropes.

In the past–and even at the beginning of this summer–I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to the mere mention of tropes. Part of the difficulty of discussing them stems from the fact that the literal definition of trope includes both the meaning cliché and common motif, device, or theme. It’s easy to conflate those definitions given the potential overlaps, but there’s a massive difference in the connotations, if nothing else. To be told your writing is cliché is a criticism at best, if not an insult. In my mind, at some point (possibly when I worked as an inventory supervisor at a big box bookstore) trope became a bad word.

The thing about major publishing companies, like all big companies, is that they chase market trends. You get some great original stuff sometimes that may or may not change the direction of a genre, but you also get a market that’s oversaturated with very similar stories all at the same time, with varying degrees of originality and quality. Some are excellent and others are frankly worn out and stale. I love spaghetti, but I don’t want bland, watery spaghetti, and I want other kinds of noodles, too: yakisoba or beef stroganoff or a pesto lasagna. Sometimes I want food that isn’t noodles, although, to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever refused pasta. Same with books, at least for me. As a reader, I want quality and I want variety, and I had come to think of tropes as antithetical to that. So as a writer, I didn’t get why other writers often spoke of tropes in a positive light…because I thought they were talking about the cliché definition: bland, watery spaghetti.

Meanwhile, other writers have largely been talking about the other definition: common motifs, devices, and themes. The literary equivalent of ingredients, with a multitude of ways to prepare or combine them that may be predictable, surprising, or some balance between the two. For two years in a row, I was a speaker on a panel about tropes at InConjunction in Indianapolis, and it wasn’t until weeks after the second one this summer that I realized that what I thought we were discussing was not what we were actually discussing, because I was stuck on this idea about clichés. Well, that’s embarrassing. But I’m past the point in life where being embarrassed is more important than what I learned from it, so you get to hear about my goofy ass misunderstanding something for years at a time and what I’m now realizing has been a huge hangup in my own writing journey for decades.

To paraphrase something someone on the panel said this summer (apologies to my fellow panelists and the audience, because I can’t remember who said it), there’s nothing new under the sun, and the trick is not to come up with something that’s never been done, but to bring your own original voice and perspective. That advice is also not new, exactly, but in the context of rethinking what tropes represent to a writer and to their readers, it’s been sinking in for the first time that I have had such a hell of a time finishing things I start–even get hundreds of pages into–because I’m so inhibited about doing something predictable (with the negative association of the cliché) with a plot that I’ve made it so that there’s no path forward for myself. I can’t wrap up the story because you can’t have both a completely unpredictable and a completely emotionally satisfying conclusion to a story. If I’ve made a rule for myself, even subconsciously, that I can’t follow a story to an ending that feels natural because that would be “too obvious” or has “been done before”, then any ending I move toward will automatically feel wrong. To me. To my readers. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a twist or a surprise or an original take, but (1) the setup has to be in place for that to work and (2) twist endings are also (guess what?) a trope! I’ve had myself in a stalemate with endings for most of my writing life, and the few things I’ve managed to actually complete and publish have always been the result of me saying, often literally and out loud to my keyboard, “Fuck it! Let’s just do it!” to get over the logical fallacy I trapped myself in.

There are two other things (aside from the tropes panel) that have shaken loose my trope-phobia and made me reconsider the role of tropes in the media I consume, as well as the differences I’m noticing between what I’m drawn to as a reader/viewer and my self-imposed rules for myself as a writer (which now seem very unreasonable). I’ll discuss them more in a later post, and you can laugh at me about them if you want, but I won’t care because (a) I won’t be able to hear you and (b) I’m too old to care if people on the internet laugh at me. Anyway, one of the things is SCIENCE and the other is K-dramas. Bet you’re curious now. If you’re not, (a) I can’t hear you and (b) I don’t care. Just kidding, I value all my readers and their perspectives, as long as you’re not rude.