We here at TV Tropes are not the first to collect tropes and try to put them in some semblance of order. If you happen to run across a resource (a book, website, or other useful thing) that discusses a set of tropes, write up a summary page and stick the link on this index.
Personality Profiles:
The most common trope collections are personality profiles. Many people have devised systems of sorting characters into a handful of pigeonholes (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), The Enneagram, the D&D Character Alignment system, etc.). Of course, they tend to think this works well for sorting people, whereas we're going to take the more sensible view that it works well for sorting fictional characters who aren't nearly as complex as your average real human. They're useful systems for the writer as well as for the reader, so eventually we'll get them up here.
- Five Foundations of Morality
- 45 Master Characters
- Big Five Personality Traits
- The Characters of Theophrastus (you can read it here
)
- Tabletop Games such as Dungeons & Dragons have:
- Character Alignment (mostly in D&D)
- Player Archetypes (discussed in assorted books, magazine articles, etc.)
- The Complete Writer's Guide to Heroes & Heroines
- The Enneagram
- Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator
- Relational Models Theory
- Systems of Survival
- Attachment Theory
Basic Plots:
People have also tried to condense the wide and varied world of plots into a small and succinct list of possible plots. The most basic system says that all plots are about one of two things, love and death, but the list can go up to fifty or even more. Joseph Campbell tried to pin it all down to a single heroic version in The Hero's Journey, and while that doesn't cover every story, it works with a lot of them (and George Lucas decided to base Star Wars all around Campbell's work). It's when people start claiming that Schindler's List has the same plot as Alice in Wonderland that we start to wonder if their systems make any sense, but hey, maybe they had a flash of inspiration. At any rate, studying plot archetypes can help writers to straighten out the odd kinks that are throwing them for a loop, and maybe to introduce elements that strengthen the overall story and underscore its thematic meaning. As for the reader... well, it's always fun to realize, halfway into the new blockbuster, that you're really watching a postmodern sci-fi version of Beauty and the Beast.
- The 7 Basic Conflicts: As formulated by various critics.
Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Himself, Man vs. God/Fate, Man vs. Society, Man & Woman, etc. - The 7 Basic Plots, as analyzed by Christopher Booker
- The Areas of My Expertise offers another Fifty-Five Dramatic Situations
- Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction: Sci-Fi inventions can be the focus of the story, a prop, or a societal impact.
- "The Author's Ordeal": Turns the exercise of writing a Science Fiction story into a nightmare of obsession and distraction until you can finally finish the manuscript.
- The Big List of RPG Plots by S. John Ross contains 33 common Tabletop RPG adventure hooks and a larger number of twists that can be applied to them.
- The Hero's Journey
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
- The Hollywood Formula
- Master Plots
- Poetics by Aristotle, the Ur-Example.
- Power Screenwriting has Structural Archetypes: The Hero Myth, Outlaw Myth, Inverted Myth, etc.
- Propp's Functions of Folktales, which gives a list of elements often found in fairy tales
- Save the Cat! has Ten Movie Plots.
- The Seven Western Plots
- Story Structure Architect offers 55 Dramatic Situations.
- Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting
- Understanding Comics
Lists of Clichés:
Dead Horse Tropes can be surprisingly stubborn beasts, refusing to leave the media well after they've been discredited, disbarred, and run out of the country for being So Last Century. The more that writers recognize the possible clichés that exist, the more they're able to avert, subvert, and even invert the critters, allowing for the possibility that their viewers are not morons and just might enjoy watching something written with a little connection to reality. Then again, it's just fun to review all the oddities that make up our collected media history (laser printers that still sound like a Dot Matrix?) and then play drinking games over recognizing when they show up in our favorite sitcoms.
- American Cornball
- The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus
- Eberts Glossary Of Movie Terms
- Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga: A manga about how to write cliché-filled manga.
- Evil Overlord List
- The Fantasy Novelists Exam
- Feminist Frequency: Web series analyzing the representation of women in media. And inspired by this very website.
- Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
- The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés
- The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés
- How NOT to Write a Novel, by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman. Contains around 200 examples of bad writing, many of them dealing with Bad Writing or tropes used horribly.
- How to Be a Superhero
- How to Write Badly Well
- Limyaael's Fantasy Rants
- The RPG Cliches Game
- Silly Novels by Lady Novelists by George Eliot
- Terrible Writing Advice
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
- Turkey City Lexicon
- Polish Uncyclopedia's article on "Theory Of Movie Reality"
- The Universal Genre Savvy Guide
- Why Literature Is Bad for You by Peter Thorpe, which discusses the detrimental effects reading can have in the wrong mindset, and how it can even attract people who write badly or even encourage people to write badly.
- Worst Muse: A Twitter blog which sarcastically passes off terrible writing practices and Cliches as good writing tips, inevitably mocking them to hell and back in the process.
Other works:
- The American Credo discusses many things believed to be true by Americans in Real Life; not surprisingly, many of them are also common tropes in American fiction.
- Blowing Up the Movies examines two dozen famous action movies for the coolest action genre tropes and trope combos they exemplify and analyzes how these can be used as tools to improve Tabletop RPG campaigns.
- Danse Macabre by Stephen King discusses Horror fiction in the 20th century and the tropes associated with it.
- The Discarded Image — A series of lectures by C. S. Lewis about the Medieval worldview and its effect on literature. Very useful. Contains explanations on the Medieval take on such tropes as Earth Is the Center of the Universe, All Myths Are True, But I Read a Book About It, and of course The Fair Folk.
- Fantasy Encyclopedia
- The Four Loves — the ones codified by C. S. Lewis, at least; never enter a Shipping debate without it!
- Hamlet's Hit Points examines one rather famous play and two movies for their narrative beats and how the understanding of these can be used to improve role-playing games.
- Help! My Story Has the Mary-Sue Disease by L.C. Morgenstern. Goes through cliches and tropes associated with the dreaded archetype by topic, but doubles as general character-writing advice.
- Hieroglyphics by Arthur Machen — Mainly used to share his theory on what makes a book true art as opposed to mere entertainment but also discusses the nature (and pitfalls) of various tropes.
- Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics
- On Fairy-Stories by J. R. R. Tolkien.
- What Does a Martian Look Like?? (aka. Evolving the Alien) by biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart is about exobiology — but it also takes a science fiction author's point of view for imagining the alien, and discusses a lot of the traditional tropes associated with aliens in fiction, most of which are revealed as anything but realistic.
Miscellaneous:
- Atomic Rockets — A resource for hard science fiction writers.
- Bishop Barron's works often look at the philosophical and religious background of the most popular tropes in today's culture.
- "The Craft of the Adventure": Essay on Interactive Fiction game design.
- Dramatica — This is a rather complicated literary theory that divides story telling into 4 story tellers, 64 "Quads" of 4 properties that examine 64 questions that must each be explored and resolved and...well...There's a 360 page PDF to read and you can buy a rather expensive program to sort it all out. Like most theories, it works pretty well often enough to help most of the time, but there are exceptions. The comic book version is pretty easy to follow.
- Extra Credits — Lectures on story and mechanics tropes in video games, and how game developers can get the most use out of them to make better games.
- "The Foundation of S.F. Success": Gives advice on tropes/tricks of popular Science Fiction for potential new writers. (Take it with a grain of salt.)
- How to Read Nancy: Analysis of the comic strip Nancy.
- Sexypedia Wiki: A wiki compiling characters and tropes associated with the "Tumblr/Fandom Sexyman" phenomenon, as well as documenting how fanon interpretations of said characters affect how they are seen by their respective fandoms over time.
- Springhole
- Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture: Henry Jenkins' landmark study of fandom and how fans interact with the media they consume, including several chapters on fan works.
- Writing Excuses
Resources without their own pages:
- The 36 Dramatic Situations
- The 37 Basic Plots, According to a Screenwriter of the Silent-Film Era
- 100 Rules of Anime Physics
- Aarne-Thompson Classification System and Stith Thompson Folk Motif-Index describe a massive set of descriptors for folktales. For example, in "An Encyclopedia of Fairies" by Katharine Briggs she gives a breakdown of Cinderella. It is Type 510 (an example of Supernatural Helpers) and contians Motifes S31: Cruel stepmother; L55: Stepdaughter heroine; F311.1: Fairy godmother; D1050.1: Clothes produced by magic; F861.4.3: Carriage from pumpkin; N711.6: Prince sees heroine at ball and is enamoured; C761.3: Taboo: staying too long at ball. Must leave before certain hour; and H36.1: Slipper test. Given that the motif index is apparently six large volumes the detail seems overwhelming!
- Daily Life Through History Series: A vast hoard of Useful Notes. Use these for research and you will never again write Hollywood History by accident.
- Ebert's Little Movie Glossary
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: Originally published, for two editions, in paper form; the third edition is now a large and continually maintained Web site. The entries on "Themes" cover many topics that correspond to tropes round here. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy was originally published as a follow-up and companion to the former work, and the full, indexed text of that is held on the same Web site, but is not being updated; it too has a lot of entries for themes, though one should note that many of them are somewhat ... idiosyncratically ... named or described by critic John Clute.
- Hero's Journey vs Heroine's Journey
- Alternative link here
- Alternative link here
- How to Read Literature Like A Professor by Thomas C. Foster — basic plots, clichés, and devices.
- How to Write a Historical Young Adult Novel with an Indian Theme (For Fun and Profit)
- How to Write about Africa and How to Write about Japan; actually, how not to write about these places.
- Planning on writing a gay novel? is based on clichés in gay fiction.
- The Right Writing
- The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy
- The Screenwriters' Taxonomy: A seven-tiered genre categorization system made to help screenwriters conceptualize their movie's genre based on audience expectations.
