Writing With Tropes

For romance writers, we all know about those tropes: secret babies, arranged marriages, friends to lovers and so forth. All of these are great elements to stories, however, too many author make HUGE mistakes when they write their romances. They simply make the ENTIRE story about the trope.

That is a problem.

Let me explain. 

If you make your entire story about that single trope, the story becomes repetitive. Your story has to keep coming back to the same point over and over again, just from different angles. At some point, your readers are going to just get bored. Frankly, there are only so many ways you can say the same thing.

What we really want you to see is to just use that trope as a small part of your bigger story. If you want to give us a regular contemporary romance, let's say you set it in the corporate world and the two characters are fighting for the same job. Not anything overly fancy but you get the idea. Now, we can throw in the "secret baby" part but maybe just hide a pregnancy knowing that might screw up the corporate plot line. Get the idea? It is just a piece of the puzzle. 

Again, when you think about those tropes you see editors talk about what they like, this DOES NOT mean they want you to write the trope. Just remember that.  

Tropes Are Not Your Story

So, let's talk about tropes today. First of all, if  you are a literature person, in other words, you graduated from college with a literature major, your brain is thinking a different definition of trope than most of us. So, for this post, I would like to thank my father (who unfortunately is no longer with us for my birthday present for sponsoring this post) for the definition of Trope from the OED.

"A figure of speech which consists in the use or a phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it"

Now, over the years, we have seen a new use of the word trope in literature which many of you have been using. In this case, I am going to reference an article "What is a Trope" Oregon State University Associate Professor of Medieval Literature who defines it as: 

... is a story telling convention, device or motif; specific tropes might be a characteristic of a particular genre of storytelling. For instance, one trope you see all over the place in folktales is the "rule of three" - where three characters or events create a predictable pattern (usually two failures and a success). We might think of the Three Little Pits, the magic lamp that grants three wishes, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella and her two stepsisters, and so on.

I bring this up today, especially for you romance authors who seem to now believe the trope is EVERTHING. You all seem to believe the trope is the plot.

The problem with this is that you have now created a story that is not amazing, not unique, and not something editors and agents are going to be excited about. In fact, if you get a reject letter back that says your story is to "trope" (is this even a word)"  or that your story is too "trope heavy" this is what they are referring too. You have literally drowned the reader in the trope. You are barfing trope!

What you have to remember is that a little trope goes a long way. 

There is nothing wrong with throwing a trope in a story. You want a forced marriage. Fine. Toss it in just for kicks. Spend all of 80,000 words on it? TOO MUCH. Secret baby? Sure, surprise the hero at the end of the story. Walk in on page 1 with the little rascal who is now in her second year of college and is $120,000 in debt with college loans and NOW YOU WANT TO BRING IT UP? Ummmm, no. 

Just think of it this way. If you watch those cooking competition shows and they slam the contestants for using too much sesame oil or truffle oil.

The same goes for tropes. Use too much...

And you will be CHOPPED!