Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!
In 2023 YeahWrite’s free workshop is going back to the basics with a focus on tropes, the sometimes imperceptible and often underrated building blocks of writing. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).
The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.
So what’s a trope, anyway?
Every year in January we try to give you a helpful rundown of vocabulary terms you might need during the workshop series. This year it’s easy, because you’ve only got one word to remember: trope.
Etymologically speaking, trope means a “turn” as in a turn of phrase or often-repeated figure of speech. But we’ve been using it to mean a recurring theme or device in literature for more than 200 years now so don’t get hung up on the volume of words involved. “A single tear ran down her cheek” is a trope. So is the plot device where an evil twin is actually responsible for everything someone is inexplicably doing.
For our purposes, a trope is a building block of storytelling. It’s a device or pattern of events that is used to solve plot or character problems or communicate meaning efficiently and effectively.
With that definition it’s easy to see the positive aspects of tropes. There are, of course, negatives. This year we’ll be examining some of the most common tropes (and, if you’re a paid member, you can suggest your favorites) and where they slide from trope to trap, making your writing sound tired, lazy, and cliché. You don’t want your story to be one trope after another, but you don’t want to have to reinvent the wheel every time you have a problem to solve, right?
So with all that in mind, let’s take a speedrun through a couple common tropes. Don’t worry: we’ll be delving much deeper into each month’s tropes than this, with examples of how to do it right, where you miss the mark, what problems you might be solving with the trope, and what other methods of problem solving you might want to use.
Ope, a trope
As you may have guessed from the title of this section, I spent some time in the US Midwest. Putting in a shortcut trope like “ope” (or the Canadian sohrry) can be a compact, efficient way to communicate a character’s background. On the other hand, the more tropes you add to a character build, the more likely you are to end up writing something racist, transphobic, homophobic… you name a bad stereotype, there’s a trope for it. Let’s look at some more tropes from tiny to huge and see where they might be useful or tricky.
Tiny tropes: actions
As many children discover when they’re looking for ways to use obscene words and gestures without getting in trouble, actions don’t necessarily mean the same thing across cultures. That’s the trap in this trope: know what audience you’re writing for, and what meaning they’ll read into a gesture. Still, as long as you’re here reading in English on a site that’s hosted in the USA, here are some common gestural tropes, and their unpacked meanings:
- A single tear runs down a character’s cheek
- What we know about this character: they are in the habit of stoicism but they are feeling an emotion so large that it squeezes out anyway.
- Why we’re tired of reading this: It can feel like jamming a “look how brave and noble my character is” narrative into a story when the character hasn’t earned or displayed that quality.
- Vomiting from nervousness
- What we know about this character: they are extremely worried.
- Why we’re tired of reading this: besides the obvious “it’s gross” reasons, nervous vomit is actually incredibly messy and inconvenient to manage.
- Not eating (from sadness)
- What we know about this character: They’re so deeply affected by the preceding events that they’re not caring for themself and may be actively dissociating.
- Why we’re tired of reading this: It’s disordered eating and should be treated as such in the story. It’s also not somehow sweeter or prettier than other forms of grief and as a society we’re trying to move away from valorizing anorexia. If a character is genuinely so emotionally exhausted that they’re unable to manage basic self-care, it’s better to show all of that than to create this scene where they waste away prettily like the heroine of a Victorian moral book for children.
- Speaking in a thick accent/dialectic speech
- What we know about this character: This type of speech can point out not just that a character (whether it’s the speaker or the POV character listening to the speech) hasn’t assimilated into a dominant society but can show where they came from and even contain class markers that help readers understand their background without a lot of exposition.
- Why we’re tired of reading this: Phonetically written dialect is frankly exhausting for readers and should be used sparsely if at all (describing the speech pattern with an example or two and then carrying on with ordinary spellings of words letting readers assume an accent is usually better practice). This trope is rarely used without the author being consciously or unconsciously racist—if your characters have speech patterns outside your personal cultural competencies and you want to use this trope to make suggestions about the characters? Get a sensitivity reader.
Medium sized tropes: setups
- They were roommates (oh my god they were roommates)
- The problem it solves: Gives characters a reason to spend prolonged amounts of time together even though they apparently have little in common.
- The problem it can create: You’ll need to make sure underlying reasons for being in the same place still make sense, and that the characters aren’t so different that it becomes a /r/BadRoommates situation. (I don’t actually know if that’s a real subreddit but it sounds plausible.)
- The Hidden Injury
- The problem it solves: Can display character traits; can be a reason for a character to display care or nurturing tendencies that they’ve been avoiding.
- The problem it can create: Some people need to do more research on how injuries work. For example, you’re probably not just going to walk around with a stab wound casually, depending on where it is. Especially if the location compromises something like your abdominal wall.
- There was only one bed
- The problem it solves: YOU KNOW THIS ONE.
- The problem it can create: Try to picture a real life situation where this isn’t actually a little creepy? That’s the amount of work you’ll need to put into this setup.
The big ones: plots!
Look, if your whole plot is a trope I don’t know what to tell you except that you should spend every word you write subverting expectations and knowing what you’re doing. Just because Joe Campbell and Aristotle think that all stories can be boiled down to one or even two flexible tropes doesn’t make that true.
- I gotta get home (to Kansas, etc)
- The problem it solves: makes a reason for your character to engage with plot points that they’d otherwise avoid, like that witch that’s trying to kill them.
- The problem it can create: can lead to one-note characters who don’t engage deeply with the world around them (looking at you, Gulliver).
- Revenge!
- The problem it solves: creates a clear dichotomy between protagonist and antagonist
- The problem it can create: The “bad guy” is rarely well developed and often depends on “does bad things because is bad” or is shown through horrible acts rather than the acts having any motivation. Leads to: fridging; gratuitous violence (note the word gratuitous- it’s not that you can’t or shouldn’t include violence if you want, but do it purposefully); racism.
In conclusion…
Obviously, that’s nothing like an exhaustive list of tropes. Heck, even TV Tropes admits its list isn’t exhaustive. We’re looking forward to talking storytelling and problem solving with you this year using these tools. See you at this month’s meeting?
Your turn!
Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society.
Join the Scarlet Quill Society!
Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. The January meeting is free and open to all, and will take place on Wednesday, January 18 at 2:00 pm US Eastern time! Future dates and times TBD based on member availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible.
You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.
- $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. (The January meeting is free, but please use this link to RSVP!)
- $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
- $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!
A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.
