Let's have some trope talk

[HGohwell]

Isn't trope like literally a term that means "something used in a piece of media"? So by definition you are using them and it doesn't matter what your opinion of it is. From TVTropes own website:

A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell. We collect them, for the fun involved.

Tropes are not the same thing as cliches. They may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.

TVTropes is just collecting the common ones and is constantly changing and rearranging. For instance @joannekwan your "battle angel" would just fall under general tropes like Super Soldier and Action Girl unless there's something specific separating them from that commonly and if there is, suggest it as a new trope and people will discuss whether it is different with you. So yes, you're work and almost everyone's work is definitely full of tropes. Got a beginning middle and end? Got a hero and villain? You've got tropes. TVTropes even tells you to start with those when making a page for a new series. Unless you're making something wildly different from everything that's ever come before, you've got a lot of tropes.

That said, you tend to find tropes to fit your work a lot easier when you're not looking and just wandering through. Whenever I think, I'll start looking for tropes to fit and maybe make a page, I start over thinking and can never quite find the right ones. When I'm just browsing, I find them everywhere. Problem is you're too close to your own work, which is why the best pages are fan curated, not done by the creator. But just off the top of my head, The 1st Rule hits a half ton of giant robot tropes and military tropes, I'm sure. Start vague, look at your genre or media conventions rather than characters or plot.

[Kelheor]

Well, yes, sure. Trope is not the same as a cliche, while some of them are. The thing about avoiding them is more of a, if you know that something is a trope, would you go with it, or would you try to subvert it or go with something completely different instead? Of course, unlike most cliches, many tropes are very well liked and even celebrated (I am looking at you Hero's Journey), some are unavoidable if you a writing a specific type of a story (Time travel, for example). But maybe some just want to avoid using well-walked road entirely?

[HGohwell]

This is actually a super huge issue I've seen in young/newer creators. Especially over in the YA/NA and web-published like here on Tapas or Amazon self publishing sections. They're more interested in what tropes they're using and how that looks and "subverting expectations" that telling a good story. When done well naturally, sure subvert in tropes or going with something different is great, but when writers are aware of them and think about that too much while writing you go subversion for the sake of subversion and it ends up making no sense at all. You can always tell when a creator has been looking at tropes when writing rather than planning an actual story.

[Kelheor]

What's YA/NA?

[HGohwell]

Young Adult/New Adult

[skicoak]

The group I'm with works in short story arcs in an anthology format.... so tropes/cliches are like shorthand we use to set up practically everything. We don't have the creative space to world build from scratch.

[Jenny-Toons]

Just like @HGohwell said, a story is going to have some type of trope in some way. Some are just more obvious than others.

Sides, a lot of the good stories we talk about have tropes and/or have build their stories off existing stories. It's that feeling of familiarity and the awe in seeing someone twist that familiarity into something else.

I know my comic "Our Universe" might have the trope of "Mysterious Eyes" or "Love at First Sight", but it's just been twisted into a different way. It's why on TvTropes, we also see different examples from different medias of one trope.

[ble]

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[lotusware]

I would much rather use a story that sets up the world quickly using tropes than have one that uses exposition to set the world up.

A good example would be show a skirmish with swords, people blasting magic bolts, and a dragon on page one instead of using a wall of narrative text on the first page that tells me its a high fantasy romp.

I don't need things to be explained when a trope can be used arguably better. Better to be a Lord of the Rings rip-off with a twist than a poorly written story that tries as hard as it can to avoid being Lord of the Rings at the expense of a good story.

[mrtoontastic]

I use tropes! Quite a good amount of them. But sometimes, I never realize I am until I look them up. XD I'm always so invested in what I'm creating that the need to know what tropes I AM using doesn't come to mind. And even when I realize it, that's fine to me, because you're allowed to bend, twist, follow, or even trip on tropes as much as you please. They're stories, and we all use them one way or another.

[Kittosaurus]

My story centers around a Librarian so I like to explore tropes and try and turn them on their heads

[dawgofdawgness]

You can’t NOT have tropes in your story, because tropes make up your characters, settings, and plot. There’s no way to avoid every single trope in a desperate attempt to make your story “unique” and it’s just gonna be a weird jumble of hipster nonsense. Your story can be compelling, stylistic, and unique without Trying to get rid of every single cliche in the book.
Like with the movie Memento - it’s a good movie with an interesting plot line. It’s also littered with tropes and cliches- acyually I would argue that the main premise itself IS a trope(amnesia - with a twist). It’s still good though.

So while distracting cliches can ruin a story or imply that the writer doesn’t know what they’re doing, that’s usually because the writer doesn’t know HOW to work with them.

So yeah, tropes and cliches are good, as long as you’re using them creatively and effectively.

[Chroma]

What @dawgofdawgness said. Tropes are as old as language--maybe older! If somehow you managed to write a story without a single preexisting trope throughout the whole thing, you might have just achieved the single greatest feat of writing ever accomplished.

Tropes are a tool to use, whether you're aware that you're using them or not. Heck, even cliches are useful (and personally, they get kind of a bad wrap, if you ask me)! You dont need to study them to write an effective story, but it never hurts to sharpen your understanding of storytelling techniques. I personally try to write first, identify the tropes I've used and then try to spin them in a way that I think is both coherent and creative!

[chocolatteboss]

I generally try to avoid tropes, I really want to be unique.

However, tropes exist for a reason. even in real life you may see a things reoccur. It's not a bad thing to use tropes as long as you make them work in your story.

as long as you end up with sth fun what's the harm?

[HGohwell]

I think there's a growing problem on the internet that people are starting the lose the difference between trope and cliche.

Like @ghostieblu to not use tropes you'd have to do something completely world breaking and unique like no one has ever seen before and off the top of my head, you've got a Dream World setting trope, Deadpan Snarker, Teenage Hero hero tropes, just having a hero is a trope, Lady In Red, the mirrors a Mcguffin, Snarky Non Human Sidekick ect. You also hit genre tropes like Holiday Nonupdate. Sorry to pick you out but you said you try not to them. Just by your story existing you're using tropes.

Hell Speech Bubbles are a trope and I'm willing to bet nearly every comic creator here uses those.

[gh0stcr33p]

I know they're in there. I never said that I don't include them, I just said that I try to. but yeah, maybe I just confused tropes and cliches.

[Ceru]

Food for thought: is it even possible to write a story without ending up with at least one trope, intentional or not?

[baasinsimple]

Well, in my personal opinion tropes are impossible not to come by, every writer has a focus, what that focus does is (drives a certain audience and what-not) enhance a strength of a certain series, but they'll use tropes to fill in the gaps. Hunter X Hunter has a focus on a power system and character writing, so naturally it'd use tropes in areas Togashi didn't really give a shit about, like world building. An inverse would be One Piece, it's character writing is good, don't get me wrong but it has a shit ton of tropes and the main appeal of the Straw Hat pirates isn't their depth (though they're well developed) but the interactions they have together. But the strength of One Piece would be world building. So naturally to build these realistic worlds, which takes way too much effort to do well, things like actual fights and character writing may be made more simplistic or trope filled in order to service Eiichiro Oda's and the Reader's time.

As @HGohwell said, people are way too focused on subverting expectations that they just end up writing a terrible/dumb story, because they are just aware what that trope is, and like the idea of subverting just because they think a trope is kind of dumb while not understanding what the trope is from the inside out. While in reality, the only people who subvert tropes well are: Older writers who have had experience with a Trope or Someone who's only focus with the story is subverting that trope (which is dumb, you'll end up with a bad story even if that part is interesting) But the worst part is that there's also shitty ways to subvert a trope. Like Damsel in Distress, taking a full 360 into 'Tough girl in Distress, kind of, not really' is kinda stupid seeing as we still see her kicking ass through out most of the comic or novel and takes away for any sort of motivation from a Main Character. What would work is acknowledging the tropes that go along with 'Damsel in Distress' because DinD is a plot device for a story to happen, not the story itself. So people do things like make the Damsel save herself even though it defies all logic within the story, while they could actually do something interesting, like making the damsel a manipulative, slimy, piece of shit instead of just a 'tough gal'.

[Kelheor]

That would be an interesting exercise to try and write something completely trope free, or at least with every trope subverted without becoming another one. Otherwise, yeah, it is how you use them and how much you rely on tropes to tell your story for you. Clever use of tropes can even be the catch of your story. A movie example, but still, in "Brick" Rian Johnson takes every noir trope and even cliche I can think of and twists them into a high school setting, making the story feel very fresh. So from my point of view, you should just be aware of what you are writing. If your story demand a use of a trope, and it work good with it - go for it. If you want to use a trope, just to make the story more streamlined - be careful with it. If you simply don't know what is a trope and what is not, you can end up with a too generic of a story even if the premise itself is fresh.

[skicoak]

I loved BRICK, and most things noir flavored, but I don't know if it "twisted" tropes as much as it just recast the traditional archetypes into a high school setting. That sort of shifted the narrative a tad but structurally it still played out as a traditional noir story.

Still, a great movie and worthy of more discussion than it usually gets.