Tropes Bad? PSA/Mini Rant

If you’ve ever been a young aspiring author who’s obsessed with Youtube like me, you’ve probably come across one of those videos with a title like “20 Tropes Publishers are TIRED of Seeing,” “20 Ways NOT to Start a Book,” or “20 Clichés to AVOID in Writing.” They usually meet one or more of the following criteria.

-Opinions being delivered as facts

-Featuring a woman standing in front of a bookshelf

-20 minutes worth of explaining why tropes in books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games should not be present in your book despite their wild popularity

-A quirky looking new age author with less than 3 stars on Goodreads telling you in a whiny voice that you NEED to come up with NEW IDEAS in order to be a good author

Before anyone comes for me, no I’m not addressing anyone specifically, and as someone who has yet to finish my book and publish it, any author who’s managed to get published gains respect in my book.

But scrolling through Youtube, I find so many of these videos, and what’s worse, young aspiring authors in their comment sections getting discouraged because their book features a love triangle, a great quest, or a chosen one.

Young/new writers (and sometimes even the greats) are usually pretty sensitive beings when it comes to their work, and it’s easy to plant the seed of doubt in their hearts.

And while I don’t agree that we should just blindly push forward without any reflection on our own work and ability to see perhaps TOO MUCH of a good series in our own book and choose to correct that, these videos are so prolific and destructive in their nature that at this point they just feel like a smear campaign and attempt to stop competition at the source.

There is a big difference between telling young writers what has worked FOR YOU, and telling them what they can and cannot do while claiming to be an expert on the matter, especially if you’ve not even published yet.

I will say time and time again that the reason tropes exist is because they WORK.

As much as I and other critics/writers believe books like Twilight are chock full of issues, their wild popularity are living proof that tropes work.

At the end of the day, audiences adore love triangles, vampires/monster characters, brooding bad boys, etc. And the authors that have had the most success haven’t been afraid to use them. Audience passions flow and ebb like the tides, but there are certain tropes that simply stand the test of time, and even if they leave, they always come back. History repeats itself after all.

Brian Jacques, one of my favorite authors of all time, wrote the same book 22 times and published it, and managed to sell over 30 million copies worldwide in multiple languages, and landed at the top of the best sellers’ list multiple times.

And that’s not me being a smartass. It’s the truth. The Redwall series consists of introducing us to our protagonist(s) and antagonist, loads of food and feasts, a puzzle or some other form of mystery that needs to be solved, and then a final climactic battle.

The details are just that; details. At the end of the day, Jacques found a system that worked and he cranked out a glut of novels based on that system. And audiences ate them up, and still adore the books to this day, myself included.

I daresay the key to using tropes is to learn how to utilize them correctly. Sure, you can certainly just slap a bunch of tropes on a page and publish it and depending on the genre your book will still sell.

But if you learn in what situations tropes work best, and where they’ll shine most in your books, they’ll be a lot more titillating to your readers.

We as humans are programmed to recognize and appreciate patterns, sameness, and rhythms. This is why nuance and connections in stories feel satisfying to us. Certainly we don’t want to read the same exact book over and over, which is where putting your own spin on tropes, having your own unique characters, and coming up with a solid story first are so important. But tropes are also important.

They make your book recognizable, relatable, and understandable to readers.

Something else I’ve seen a lot of on Youtube is these same new age authors who have given tons of writing advice on what not to do, publish a novel that gets absolutely slammed by audiences.

And what we see happening, or at least my opinion on what is happening, is these authors are so hyper-focused on coming up with something completely new, innovative, and next level that they forget to add in that humanity. That recognizable pattern. That thing that grounds it in our hearts as we read. That moment where we are reading and we smile, because that’s one of our favorite tropes, or maybe we’ve seen it in our favorite book.

Instead, we just get a sloppy mess of trope avoidance that feels more like we’re trying to find our way through a bad maze than an enjoyable read.

Authors are finding out exactly what happens if your book has none of the following:

-A journey

-A chosen one

-A prophecy

-An enemies to lovers or enemies to friends plotline

– An or multiple flashbacks

These are all things I’ve seen Youtubers specifically tell writers to avoid, and the most common question is what is left? This certainly isn’t the extent of the list either, and I’ve seen a lot of young writers realize that if they took every trope mentioned in a Youtube Top 20 list out of their book, they’re left with no book at all, or something so unrecognizable publishers/audiences aren’t interested.

If you think about writing like building a house, I just don’t understand why any author or writer would discourage other writers from utilizing an existing wooden framework and building something great on top of that and encourage them to build their house entirely out of straw instead.

And at the end of the day I suppose that’s the extent of what I want to say. Because it perfectly sums up what these videos are doing to new authors.

Please don’t be afraid to use tropes, and please don’t be discouraged by this.

And I suppose that I will leave you all with my least favorite trope, since this post is entirely opinion based.

My least favorite trope is an often brunette woman standing in front of a bookshelf telling new writers to avoid using methods that work.

I love you, and your writing is worthy and your tropes are not bad.

Happy writing.