Avoiding the Trope-osphere

When I was working on “Etched in Fire” and workshopping my chapters, everyone in my workshop seized on a particular scene. Without too much detail, someone was being slowly choked to death in a dramatic fashion. I was quite happy with the scene – until everyone in my workshop pointed out to me that it read very much like the character was being “Force-choked” (ie. the scene where Darth Vader chokes a colleague via the Force in the original “Star Wars”). I was not very happy with the comparison, because I had been rather proud of that scene, but when everyone else sees a problem, the chances are it’s actually there. Obviously, if I was unintentionally re-creating a famous movie scene, it was a problem. I changed the scene, and in fact it was much stronger for the change. Trope averted.

But why is it a problem to use tropes? Aren’t tropes just the distilled essence of some powerful scene that resonates through a reader’s (or viewer’s) mind? And if so, doesn’t that make it stronger rather than weaker?

Here’s what I think: Yes, it is a distillation of a powerful scene. Yes, it has resonance, and is powerful. But the thing that makes it powerful – its ubiquitous nature – also weakens it. Like clichés, like figures of speech, tropes cause people to make assumptions and shorthand their reading of a scene. In other words, since they know what’s going to happen, they don’t notice what is actually happening. And whether you go where they expect or not, the introduction of the trope makes them stop paying attention.

It is possible to play with tropes and hold the reader’s attention. If you start out using a particular trope, and end up breaking it dramatically, that will certainly make people take notice. It may even have a humorous effect; some of the greatest writers have used trope-breaking for both comic and dramatic readings. Roger Zelazny, for instance, was a master of the technique, and his works were tremendously powerful, with punches of comedy that were organic to the story rather than added specifically for comic relief.

Most of us don’t have Roger Zelazny’s gifts, however, and tropes are tricky to use intentionally. If you get it even a hair wrong, it may not achieve the effect you want. The single most important thing about using a trope is that, if you use one, you need to use it consciously and intentionally for a specific effect. Otherwise, it’s likely to have the wrong result.

So, how does one avoid using tropes unintentionally? I clearly slid into one without realizing what I had evoked. I was simply thinking of a dramatic scene for a villain with a very strong arm, and came up with a slow choke. I was not thinking about “Star Wars”, nor was I thinking about how it would play out to the reader. And that was a good part of my problem.

It’s hard to avoid accidental tropes. Because we see them in television and movies, we read them in books, we are faced with constant memes, when we’re not paying attention ourselves, we may slip them in, thinking that we’re being dramatic, when in fact we’re relying on an unoriginal solution that sits in the backs of our minds due to constant saturation by the media. Call it the “Trope-ic of Cancer”. We sail there by not thinking of what we’re doing. The prevailing winds make it easier than not to be blown in that direction. And if we aren’t paying attention, how do we expect attention from our readers?

Unintentional trope-ism happens most often when writing scenes of the type that occur frequently in the media. That’s partly because we tend to revert back to what we’ve seen a thousand times when we saw/read/heard about the dramatic, or romantic, or cliché scene, and without quite realizing it, follow the same tracks that so many others have taken. My “Force-choke” scene happened because I wanted the scene to be dramatic, and hooked into those tracks without thinking.

The way to avoid trope-ism is, I think, a matter of thinking through one’s scenes, of knowing what the characters would do, not just what would be dramatic for them to do. Maybe one’s character is going to do something that could be considered a trope. That’s not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but it does mean as a writer one needs to be more careful about how to approach that scene. Having a strong sense of what is motivating the characters is a key element. If the characters have a reason to do a particular action, that motivation will help the sense of originality, and even if you’re using something that is part of a trope, it’s less likely to read as “trope-ic”. If your details are specific to your story and no one else’s, it won’t sound nearly as cliché.

Beware of those scenes when you are specifically attempting to make something dramatic, and you think less about the motivation beneath the scene, and more about how it will look to the reader. That’s prime trope territory. Also beware of interactions between characters that follow a pattern, rather than being motivated by the character of the characters; for instance, a romance where otherwise rational characters are kept apart for a few misunderstood words, when they are otherwise drawn as having excellent communication.

And pay attention to your beta readers! They may see something that you wouldn’t have spotted if you were staring at a leopard. Sometimes it’s impossible to see flaws in one’s own work.

So avoiding tropes is partly a matter of author attention, intention, and detail. Make your story yours, not someone else’s. It really will pay off by immensely strengthening your writing.

And leave Force-choking to Darth Vader. He’s better at it.