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Tropes, Pasta, and Self-Sabotage: A Reflection

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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.

I can see where this is going. That pig is obviously going to throw a chamberpot over the wolf’s head and then the wolf will get cholera and all the pigs will be safe forever and this pig will be a hero and they will build statues of him in town squares for miles around.

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.

Author Persecution? Sounds Like Free Advertising!

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Last Tuesday, I did a speech for my political discourse class on extremist literary censorship.  In researching for it, I came across some interesting stuff – some of it depressing, naturally, but some of it encouraging.  The thing that really stood out to me is how often attempts to stifle dissent via literature actually strengthen writers’ abilities – instead of being allowed to point out specifics in their own societies, they have to dig deeper and find the universal.  They have to learn to put their theme between the lines, avoid preaching it outright, hone their ability to write with subtlety.  All of those skills are important to good writing, especially if a writer values social commentary.

The other beautiful irony of banned books and persecuted authors is the number of times that such bad publicity backfires and simply becomes free advertising.  Let this be a lesson to any writers who worry about being controversial….  I hope somebody with serious motivation decides my book is dangerously subversive and obscenely irreverent.  Maybe if they’re loud-mouthed enough, it’ll spark a publisher’s interest – ha!

And I really must finally get around to reading some Upton Sinclair soon, because I have a newfound fondness for him based on the fact that, when Oil was banned in Boston, he paraded through the streets reading obscene passages from the book of Genesis and from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a protest….  Has to be the best protest modus operandi I’ve heard of recently.

Friday Exercise – We’re All Mad Here

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I’ve had a series of interesting discussions (based around quantum mechanics) this week which have touched on the orderly/chaotic nature of the universe, the nature of consciousness and/or linear time, probability and the multiverse, and, well, to be Douglas Adams about it, Life, the Universe, and Everything.

This in itself is good fuel for the fiction fire, especially if you lean toward speculative fiction (as I do).  Gets the gears of imagination turning (yes, I know I just mixed metaphors, but it was in two separate sentences and this is an informal blog post, not high literature, okay?) and sparks all kinds of ideas (maybe the gears of imagination have little metal shavings rattling around which are fire hazards, which would make all three of the metaphors I’ve now mixed in these two sentences tie together into one cohesive and acceptable metaphor).

Anyway, there is plenty of inspiration to be had from reading/discussing quantum theory, but even without getting into the complex and confusing scientific end of things, I love a good long look at different perceptions of reality.  Are events random and coincidences meaningless, or are they shaped somehow?  If they’re shaped, what shapes them?  A divine being, a sub-cellular connection of some sort, the influence of a conscious universe trying to work through an identity crisis?  Is there predestiny?  Is it easy to alter the course of events, with one tiny decision changing the whole world through a ripple effect?  Or does reality re-align itself, pulling in other little coincidences to re-stablize what was thrown off?

For that matter, concepts as simple as pessimism and optimism are realities that we live in or fight against.  In the same world, we have people who function from a reality in which all good things are possible with a little kindness and effort, and others who function from a reality in which all things have an ulterior motive and the best you can hope for is to avoid falling into traps by being naive about how devious the world in general really is.  Sounds like two different worlds entirely – and yet, it’s just two different perceptions of the same thing.  And neither is entirely right nor entirely wrong.

So with all this kind of thing in mind, pick two viewpoints on reality which, at least on the surface, completely contradict each other.  Now, assume that both these viewpoints are entirely correct, and that they’re both entirely incorrect.  Free write about it, just mulling it over to yourself.  Or if characters come to you – one conflicted character who is faltering between these two viewpoints, or has a simultaneous belief in both; two characters at odds with each other because they have opposing viewpoints, or two characters who have opposing perspectives but still get along, balancing each other – then give your characters a scene to play out.  Or if it gives you an idea for an entire plot, start writing it and let this clash of ideas be the theme behind the story.