Hi guys, and happy Wednesday! I'm back from a week off blogging (following ten days of blogging every single day for the
FRAIL HUMAN HEART blogtour). The week before last I posted a link to my blog on the
Authors Allsorts site about tropes and how I feel about them. That post ended up being really unexpectedly popular, and I decided it would be a good idea to copy and paste it here so that anyone who didn't have the time or ability to click through to the AA site back then can read it now, and also so I can add it to my All About Writing Page.
In the blogpost I also refer to a couple of other posts from the All About Writing page on how to isolate and kill off cliches. Due to popular demand, I'm going to be doing a sort of Retro-Friday thing - remember that? - over on
Authors Allsorts after where I'll post a slightly updated version of those posts on this Friday (21st of August) and the Friday after (28th August), so I'll again post links here in case anyone wants to check that out.
And just a quick note to remind everyone that when
FRAIL HUMAN HEART reaches ten reviews on Amazon, I'm planning to pick one of the reviewers to receive a very special, trilogy related present. We're up to six reviews at the moment, and I appreciate each and every one of them, my duckies. *Mwah*
Now without further ado:
DASTARDLY TROPES & WHAT TO DO WITH THEM
Tropes! Huh! Wha-aat are they good for? Absolutely nuthin’ – say it again!
This probably sums up most people’s attitudes when they hear the word
‘trope’. It’s become one of those buzz terms that is flung around in
our discussion of books like a handful of annoying and unnecessary
glitter, getting into the carpet and your hair and still gleaming at you
from the crannies of your desk six months later even after you used the
hoover in an attempt to get shot of it. People talk about tropes all
the time, and their comments usually run along these lines:
Tropes! Tropes everywhere! This book would’ve been good if not
for all the tropes! These tropes are so over-used! This book is the
tropey-est of the tropey! TOO MANY TROPES!’
What is a trope? Let’s consult Google for the formal definition:
Trope
/trəʊp/
noun
noun: trope; plural noun: tropes
1. A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.
“both clothes and illness became tropes for new attitudes toward the self”
2. A significant or recurrent theme; a motif.
“she uses the Eucharist as a pictorial trope”
That second one is the one most people are most familiar with. A
trope is a recurring motif. A pattern within a story which we recognise
as having a familiar form – such as the Beauty and the Beast story, or
the Cinderella/rags-to-riches story, or the true love’s kiss ending.
More examples would be: the mother who sacrifices herself for her child,
or the mild-mannered mother who turns out to be the murderer because
the victim hurt her child, the climactic final showdown between former
best friends turned enemies, the monster in the cave, cheerleaders and
football players ruling the school, and love at first sight.
However, if you’re a fan of the TV Tropes website, you’ll know that
these days pretty much anything any writer can ever do has been
identified, codified, and is now considered ‘a trope’. Stuff the
majority of people have literally never even heard of (‘You I shall
never forgive!’) has already become a tired and over-used trope to other
people. The most moving, beautiful, shocking or gritty plot elements,
the most fully realised and nuanced characters, the most heartfelt, raw
pieces of dialogue. It’s all been done before. Everything is now a
‘trope’. Sorry!
*Blows the loudest raspberry in the world*
See, the problem with all this is that it seems the words ‘trope’ and
‘cliche’ have become interchangeable. And actually, they’re not the
same. Most people currently use the word ‘trope’ as if they universally
regarded all tropes as a bad thing. Even in talking about the most
original, unique and quirky stories, people will point out what they
believe to be tropes, either somewhat gleefully, as if they’d caught the
author out somehow, or wearily and with annoyance, as a ‘shame’, as
though the mere presence of a trope had spoiled something that would
otherwise have been good.
But if everything is a trope, what is a writer to do? Create a book
in which nothing is predictable, none of the characters are
recognisable, and everything is utterly original? This does seem to be
the gist of the ‘anti-trope’ discussions you see, and it’s a nice idea –
if it were possible. But it’s not. In order to achieve this you’d need
to literally publish a book of random words strung together randomly.
‘Nugget. Bumblebee. Scaffold. Fussbudget schaudenfreud; scrumpy marple Wimpole!’ Not a trope in sight! But not entertaining. Not actually a story at all.
Why? Because HUMANS LOVE PATTERNS. Humans instinctively and
automatically strive to make sense of the random and chaotic by sorting
it into recognisable patterns, which is why we look at clouds and see
dancing monkeys, turn the cracks in the ceiling to rivers, discover a
face hidden in the wood knots on the back of the bathroom door, and
mentally draw out the constellation of Orion in our friend’s freckles.
You can’t stop humans from being humans. You cannot alter the way the
human brain works or how people perceive and conceptualize the world.
People will find patterns. If they can find a pattern in the raindrops
on their windowpane they can certainly do it for any narrative
constructed by a fellow human being. Which means if you give them a
story, they will find tropes. From the very earliest myth of Gods and
monsters and creation that humans made up to explain the world to the
latest bestseller on the NYT bestseller lists, the same patterns can be
found, if you look hard enough.
Cliches can certainly be a bad thing (and for advice on how to kill them you can check out my posts
here and
here). They can stifle your story and characters and drain the life from them. They can be lazy, boring and even harmful.
But not all tropes are cliches, just as not all the vacuum-cleaners
you might drag into your office to get rid of glitter are hoovers, even
if the words are used interchangeably. In fact, tropes can strengthen a
writer’s work. How? In order to answer that, let’s look at another word
which I think has been forgotten in the shuffle:
archetype
/ˈɑːkɪtʌɪp/
noun
noun: archetype; plural noun: archetypes
1. a very typical example of a certain person or thing. “he was the archetype of the old-style football club chairman”
2. an original which has been imitated; a prototype. “an instrument which was the archetype of the early flute”
3. Psychoanalysis; (in
Jungian theory) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest
human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective
unconscious.
4. a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. “mythological archetypes of good and evil”
Well, would you look at that! Kind of a significant overlap, wouldn’t you say?
An archetype is, in fact, a powerful device within the storyteller’s
toolkit, something which harks back to mythology, to our most primitive
and instinctive understanding of stories, narrative, and how the world
works. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, true love’s kiss… these are all
in fact *archetypes*, patterns which crop up again and again because
they have immense narrative force, because they appeal to something
basic within almost all people. The aged mentor who passes on his
knowledge to a young protegee before falling in an attempt to protect
him is an archetype – it’s powerful because we’ve seen it before,
because we know we’ll see it again, because it can be twisted and
subverted and turned on its head and our instinct will still identify
and understand it.
Now – let’s be clear – just as all tropes are not cliches, so not all
tropes are archetypes, either. There are certainly a raft of tropes
that I would like to take gently by the hand, lead outside, and shoot
point blank in the head with a sawn-off shotgun.
But they’re probably not the same tropes that everyone else is always talking about.
You see, I honestly believe that many of the most hated tropes,
seemingly cliched and well-worn, can be transformed into archetypes –
primal and moving devices for plot and characterisation – if used
*well*. Love at first sight can still thrill our hearts. The aged
mentor’s death can still move us to tears. The final showdown between
former friends can still make our blood race. The monster in the cave
can still send a chill down our spines, and true love’s kiss can still
be the most satisfying finish.
Of course there are people who will
always loathe some or all of these, no matter how well a writer uses
them, but that’s individual taste: not the quality of work.
No, the tropes I’d like to lovingly feed into a blender are ones
like… ‘I’m telling a fantasy story, so I’d better set it in a vaguely
imagined pseudo-European Kingdom in which people of colour and gay
people don’t and never have existed, and in which women are universally
horribly oppressed and constantly assaulted and exist only to be rewards
for or obstacles to the male characters, and all my heroes are strong
manly straight white men’.
Amazingly, not many people talk about this sort of thing as either a
cliche or a trope. In fact, plenty of people – the same ones moaning
about ‘yet another teenaged heroine in a Dystopian world!’ – will
defend
this sort of lazy, cliched male power-fantasy trope. They will call it
‘historical accuracy’ even when wizards and dragons come into play, and
despite the fact that it’s actually not even faintly historically
accurate. Why?
Because it’s a cliche that people feel comfortable with.
And this, in the end, is my main problem with our current discussion
on tropes, cliches and archetypes. Too many people are all too ready to
call out the cliche/tropes that are their own personal pet peeves –
teenaged heroines, love at first sight, Cinderella stories – while
failing to examine or even *acknowledge* the harmful and downright
stupid cliche/tropes that they take for granted.
Violence against female characters (and only female characters) is
seen as ‘realistic’ instead of as a lazy cliche. The lone black
character (if we even get one) dying first is shrugged off as not
important when it happens for the six thousandth time in a row. The
cliche of the single QUILTBAG character (if we even get one) being a
flamboyant gay male whose only purpose is to act as a faithful sidekick
to a female character isn’t even noticed. The Asian person (if we even
get one) is, of course, a geeky IT whizz. The lack of non-binary or
disabled characters doesn’t register at all.
And in the end, the white,
conventionally attractive, skinny heroine will always fall in love with
the white, conventionally attractive, muscular main male lead once he’s
heroically overcome his story’s trials and tribulations, even though
he’s treated her like a piece of furniture throughout, because otherwise
what was the point of her being in the story at all?
THESE are the cliches and tropes that ultimately ruin movies, books
and TV series. They stifle truth in our storytelling, kill off the
evolution of our characters before they’ve even begun to grow, and place
painful, artificial limitations on the kind of stories we can tell and
experience. If we want to see rich, beautiful, moving, original stories
then we all ought to spend a lot less time making fun of teenaged girls
for liking love triangles (a classic archetype) and a bit more making
fun of middle aged white men who introduce female characters with a
loving description of their breasts (nothing but a sexist cliche).
Down with Dastardly Tropes, say I!
