Background – Tropes
What are tropes? Should you always avoid them?
There is something about their familiarity. It is kind of comforting, in a way. But it can also be rather stale writing to lean on them too heavily. What are the pros and cons of them?
Marketing 101
Consider one of the most basic concepts of marketing, whether it’s the latest cutting edge digital marketing (AI-infused or not) or a billboard on a lonesome highway somewhere.
One of the core concepts for both is giving your buyer persona (your ideal customer) what they want. Let’s take that to product marketing for a second, shall we?
Now, it is highly unlikely that you will go broke selling cheese pizza if your pizza is at all decent and the marketing isn’t utterly saturated. This is because lots of people love pizza, and the cheese variety is as basic as you can get. Apart from pepperoni, extra cheese is the most popular pizza topping out there.
It can be made kosher or halal, and you can add it to any standard semi-vegetarian or lacto-vegetarian diet. Sounds awesome, right?
But what if you invent, oh I don’t know, pizza-flavored coffee?
People certainly enjoy both pizza and coffee. And they may even enjoy them together. So, why not put them together into one product?
Why not?
Because ick, that’s why.
Seriously. Don’t do this.
What Does Pizza Have to do With Tropes?
Your super standard cheese pizza is equivalent to a trope. It is not only popular. It’s also expected. Yet pizza-flavored coffee is unfamiliar and weird. Even when both elements sell well, the mashup sometimes just doesn’t make enough logical sense.
So, your idea of a horror mystery science fiction romance with talking unicorns and a guest appearance by Elvis is probably going to be a bit much to people. Even if they love every single one of the elements, the mashup feels forced, overdone, and just plain odd.
Tropes and Scènes à Faire
Er, what are scènes à faire? For that, you need to go back to copyright. Scènes à faire are not really tropes. They are something different entirely.
Here’s a set of examples.
Romance Scènes à Faire
The meeting and a first date. A first kiss, and a rivalry. A relationship in peril. And a happy ending. What do all these have in common? They are so common in romances that readers and audiences have come to expect them. And, you can’t copyright them unless you get extremely specific and/or put a new twist on them.
These are all examples of scènes à faire. You’ll never get into copyright trouble (er, I’m not your lawyer, but this is kinda obvious) if your romance contains a kiss.
Horror Scènes à Faire
Don’t go into the basement! Oh my gosh, don’t go anywhere alone! Trust no one! The Scream franchise played up scènes à faire to box office gold. Characters could stay alive if they could follow the unwritten ‘rules’ of the genre. Again, unlike Freddy or Jason, these are expected bits and not copyrightable.
Science Fiction Scènes à Faire
So, there are a few subsets of science fiction, including space opera, sci-fi/fantasy, and dystopia. They all have their own scènes à faire. In a space opera, a description of the ship is fair game. So are planets, stars, and moons.
In a fantasy, magical or near-magical elements (think ‘the Force’ in Star Wars) are something a reader or audience member has come to expect. And in a dystopia, expect elements of either a fallen civilization or a fascist one.
Why Are Scènes à Faire Okay, But Tropes Kind Of Aren’t?
There is a somewhat blurry line between the expectations that come with scènes à faire and the staleness that can often accompany tropes.
TV Tropes is a gold mine here. It’s all a rabbit hole you can find yourself falling down. So, here’s a sample. Let’s look at the trope they call, One Last Job.
In this trope, a career villain agrees to ‘one last job’ before retiring. This can end up with the villain’s death or comeuppance, or the villain rejects retirement, and a bunch of other variations. This can even be attached to a good guy agreeing to one last case or arrest or the like.
TV Tropes shows not only the trope itself and where it exists, but it also points out the variant. In Supernatural, for example, Sam is the one who wants to do ‘one last job’—but he’s a teenager. Hardly a person we would call seasoned.
The Copy/Paste, the Expectation, and the Reader
If I wrote a story about ghost-hunting brothers where one of them was going to do ‘one last job’ but was swept into the fray anyway, readers would probably feel it was familiar. And for anyone who knows Supernatural, it would be way too familiar.
So, that’s probably too close. But what if I make them sisters who are bounty hunters, and take the fantasy aspect completely out of the equation? Is that enough for it to feel original yet still familiar enough to please my buyer persona and meet their expectations?
The answer is—I don’t know, unless I try.
And neither do you.
Takeaways
Tropes can actually be good tools for writing. But there are some caveats.
Getting too close to a source work or at least a general idea of one can feel stale and unimaginative. And if your own writing bores you, then imagine how your readers feel?
But getting too far away from it can throw out the baby with the bath water and turn into pizza-flavored coffee.
So, try to aim for a sweet spot, where a reader is comfortable and your work feels like coming home again, and not like a pale imitation of something that came before.
Wield your tropes wisely!