How To Make Characters From Tropes (The Guide Post)

The problem is that most new writers don't approach tropes with much flexibility in mind. That's what the last page has been spent debating about.

Also, as I said earlier, if you follow Tropes Are Flexible to its conclusion, what on earth is the point of "basing" a character off of a trope in the first place?

There isn't, because narrative roles are more useful.

The trope "Space Marine" is a bad starting point for a character. The narrative role "soldier in the military," conversely, is a good one. A Space Marine is, at this point, a cliched set-up focusing on the superficial aspects of the stereotypical future warrior, including genetic engineering, jet packs, power armor, etc. However, all that misses the actual point of a soldier character, which would be to examine the raw effects of battle on the human psyche (and body), on human interactions, both friend and foe, and on society as it unites to wage large-scale warfare using industrial methodology—or divides to oppose it. Whether approaching from a positive ("war is cool, there is glory to be earned in battle") or negative ("war is awful and humanity is evil when participating in it"), these are the themes a soldier character embodies.

Jet packs and power armor are merely means to an end, the end being the most effective way to tell a good story ("space soldiers wage a space war") that conveys these themes or themes like them.

edited 29th Apr '12 4:54:20 PM by Flyboy

What is the point of basing any character off anything? I don't know about the others, but tropes do inspire me to write certain characters/settings/stories. They're just another prompt to me.

I don't get it. Since the Space Marine trope focuses on the superficial, does that not allow more creative freedom with regards to the deeper aspects of the character?

Well I'm sorry for wasting your time and energy.

edited 30th Apr '12 1:44:14 AM by fillerdude

...And this is why I just don't have the energy anymore.

Perhaps. But since, to a general extent, the initial concept defines you thought process, it isn't good to start with a prompt focusing on the superficial. If your initial idea focuses on the irrelevant, you'll end up focusing on the irrelevant.

Excuse me, but we already have a separate thread for the people who just want to tell people not make characters from tropes. It is called "How to make characters from tropes."

It is captialized and punctuated like a proper sentence, and starts with the word "Don't," which should make everyone who wants to take writing seriously happy or at least "pleasantly serious." However, at least one person on that thread was disappointed that the "How to" thread contained no how-to knowledge. This is (The Guide Post), where we attempt to guide people who are going to do it anyway.

Thank you for your warnings, every one of you can consider yourselves the Jor-El of Creative Writing, now either pick some tropes and tell people how to write characters from them or stop derailing this particular thread.

From the Example of Deadpan Snarker, we can derive some additional rules:

Rule #2: If a Trope is worth doing, it is worth doing twice.

You may have some trouble writing a trope that you are unfamiliar with. That is understandable, because tropes are apparently just general descriptions. However, by writing two or more characters based on the same trope, they can play off each other and bring out each others trope-centric attributes. (I would have said "tropey-ness," but I'm sure if that would offend anyone) Once you learn how two characters of the same trope can reinforce the desired trope, you may have a better idea how characters based on a different trope, or perhaps no trope at all.

For example, Firefly may or may not have been based upon Han Solo from Star Wars. Many people do like the character, and characters similar to him may do well in other fiction. If Firefly was based on Han Solo, it did so by creating multiple characters based on Han Solo, including gender bent versions, and versions that may be seen as playing to particular fetishes. If you are going to base characters on tropes, do not be afraid to experiment with different tropes and trope combinations within the same character.

Rule #3: It is possible to bring out how a character fits a Trope by taking other tropes they might fit and either

A) showing how they choose not to follow the trope or B) would be unable to follow the trope even if they wanted to.

Daria, from our example of Deadpan Snarker, could have been a misunderstood girl involved in a high school romance. However, by not even liking the muscular jock, she showed how she would not choose to be in a love-triangle with him. By getting into a love-triangle through a misunderstanding, she showed how the situation would fail immediately and how she would further break the tropes of the situation. A similar thing happened at the start of Naruto when he accidentally kissed Sasuke and both of them nearly barfed to show that the show would never be a Boy's Love series, but this news apparently missed large portions of the fandom.

Excuse me, but it doesn't work like that. You can't simply make a thread praising a writing method that half of the people on this forum (including myself) consider horrible writing and expect it to go without remark. Once you post something on a forum, it becomes open to comment from others, and not all of them may agree with your ideas.

After this post I am through with this thread, personally, but it's because I'm tired of my inability to communicate with some of the people posting on here. If it wasn't for that, I would still be commenting, and unless it actually violated forum rules, there would be nothing wrong with that.

It's not terribly difficult to create a character from a trope.

The Big Guy: the head of security for a major politician, who plays the role of the hero in the story. As they go on their various day-to-day adventures in running a city/state/country, this is the guy who makes sure nobody can hurt the main character, and who directs his various mauve shirt minor character body characters in defending the politician character. Thus, when the show/story needs a change in pace, we can follow the plot through the eyes of this character, and thus shift from politics-driven drama to something potentially more action-oriented, such as an attempted assassination plot.

(I was reading about The West Wing when I came up with this example, in the interests of full disclosure).

edited 30th Apr '12 2:56:17 PM by Flyboy

You're new to the Internet, aren't you?

You toss out a methodology to the public, you should expect public commentary on it. It's the nature of working in the open.

edited 30th Apr '12 5:03:33 PM by Night

I don't have a problem with public commentary on this method, but we have an ENTIRE SEPARATE THREAD where your commentary might be considered both on topic and welcome.

That said, I felt the opening post of that thread combined with the title, was little better than a Rick Roll. This is a how-to thread for how-to knowledge. I believe that saying "Yes, and" giving helpful advice gets more done than saysing "No, just no." Giving a critical evaluation of a work before it is done actually CAUSES Writers Block!

If you are reading this thread for helpful advice, chances are you read tvtropes and found a large number of ideas in conveniently brief summary. By taking a wiki walk through those descriptions, tvtropes may have ruined your life. However, it also introduced you to more ideas than you might have encountered if you had simply viewed the source material. One of those seems like a good idea that you want to try out. Congratulations, I'll help you any way I can.

We've already covered the idea that you need to check the source material for the human relationships surrounding the trope, the idea that by making two or more characters work towards the trope together they can accomplish something neither can do alone, and by putting the character in potential tropes and rejecting them, you can restrict them to situations where they follow the trope. However, what if in the process of writing, you find your characters going along with a situation they were supposed to reject? Perhaps in the process of creating a jock, you accidentally made him intelligent or funny maybe even a draco in leather pants. That's why we include a corollary to rule #3:

Corollary 3-1: If your characters break the trope, just keep writing and see where the story goes.

This is all part of the "organic writing process" every one has been so caught up with. If you have a story in your head already, you may spontaneously think of changes while you are writing it down. This is not only good, it is a source of good examples for why your goes in a certain direction.

Perhaps you are trying to write down a detective story, and you realize that you can't describe everything in the scene the detective notices without either giving away the clues, or forgetting to put Chekov's gun on the wall. So instead you write down two detectives and have them discuss what they noticed about the scene afterward. Later you can edit one character into being Doctor Watson, a viewpoint character who follows the detective and has no idea how he does it to the very end.

Likewise, your deadpan snarker can end up in a love triangle where they actually find true love, which causes their deadpan snarker friend to feel like a third wheel and go off on their own adventure. When they come back to your viewpoint character, you can explain that they did anything from watch the news to visit another country. This explanation allows you take any subject you can think of a snarky comment for and write the characters being both deadpan and snarky about it. As a result you can get a feel for snarky dialogue and apply the lessons to subjects they would see in the course of everyday life. And because your viewpoint deadpan snarker is actually living an everyday life with their love interest you have that much more material to work with.

Now, that the thread seems to have quieted down, let's discuss the scale of the project. The total number of tropes can be found here. Seems like a hefty number of tropes, so let's aim just a little lower.

The Periodic Table was created by a troper on this thread. While not a definitive list, it is color coded for our convenience.

It gives a mere 174 tropes, 216 if you count the expansions, and makes a pun about the opening post. From it we select 5ma, the Five Man Band.

Why are there five of them. There are five of them in the hopes of creating character irony. Think of the roles they play, of the Hero who received the call to adventure, the Chick who cares, the Lancer who doesn't, the Smart Guy who plans, and the Big Guy who acts. If the Hero recieved the Call to Adventure, then they usually went through some variation of Jumping at the Call or Rejecting the Call. If they Jumped at the Call, they may assume that because they are the Chosen One, they have the power to do everything themselves and don't need help. Which makes it ironic that they are the one who makes the speech about everyone working together.

I'll continue this discussion next post.

edited 9th May '12 9:18:50 AM by ABCRevive

Look, I hate to be "that guy"—I have even consciously avoided it in the past, perhaps to detriment—but notice if you will that this breaking-down of stories into tropes and idioms is nearly always done after the fact. Tropes are a tool of analysis and, on occasion, something to play off of in the context of a story. They are not building blocks.

The point of this site isn't "this is how you write stories," it's "look at the cool patterns!" with a side of "lists are fun!" Do I think that this site would be better with a more intellectual bent? Yes. But that does not mean that this is mathematics. Linguistics is mathematical; writing is not.

Again, this is the thread, ONE THREAD, for the people who are going to do it anyway.

If you ever sat down to write and found "the good ideas have already been done," this site has not only has long lists of ideas, but has broken the ideas down into an abstract form that are easier to work with. We're currently working through 216 ideas, for brevity and we may not get through them all.

To continue the previous idea, if The Hero Rejected The Call, then they probably don't want to work with any of the characters at first. They view the Five Man Band as responsible for taking them away from the normal life, often because he or she has not been told about The Prophecy or other information crucial to the setting. In cases like these, The Lancer in particular tends to be well informed and may even represent the best a secret organization has to offer. As they express doubts about The Hero's ability to be The Hero, it would be natural for them to make a speech about how strong the team was when they work together so that he could convince them that they don't really need The Hero.

Meanwhile, The Smart Guy knows working together is the smart thing, and the Big Guy usually has enough combat experience or simple common sense not to divide the party. The Chick is usually the "heart" of the team, the one who holds everyone together, so having her make a speech about working together is natural. It has more impact when given by the reluctant hero, which may be why it is so common.

How this is done is through a mixture of Character Development and Character Depth. The Hero may not know about his new powers or their limits, so he needs time to develop his understanding. This time can also be spent learning about the problems he faces, including the Big Bad, and learning to trust his team mates. Character Depth may come into play as The Hero and the other members of the band get to know each other. The Chick may act the way she does because she wants to be "one of the guys," or because she doesn't want to be mistaken for a "pretty boy" by a grateful princess. The Big Guy usually has a soft spot, and the Lancer may be out for revenge or trying to protect a morality pet. The Smart Guy is normally written for the sake of exposition, but having them come up with gadgets and quick solutions to any problem can lead to The Smart Guy cracking under the pressure. Normally scientists work quietly in a lab on one area of specialized knowledge, but by having one Smart Guy or girl do everything, you realisticly put everyone in a situation where they have nothing works and they have no idea what is going on because "the brains of the operation" have been overtaxed.

Allowing the characters to fail in their roles creates excellant tension, such as when The Big Guy is subjected to The Worf Effect. It also allows the characters to move outside their established roles or topes. Heroes who fail and try again are nothing new, but it is interesting to see how they handle failure. Do they go back to being a farmboy, or do they simply get pissed off and hit the obstacle in their path over and over until their friends pull them back? What gives the characters the strength to fight again, and what gives them "the strength not to fight," to live with having to retreat in the slim hope that they'll be able to beat this thing later?

edited 9th May '12 10:27:47 AM by ABCRevive

"How To Make Characters From Tropes (The Guide Post)"

aka How To Be As Derivative and Uninspired As Possible

Just write your character the normal way if you want to come up with something that's half decent.

It's not a method I agree with but if the end result is lifelike characters with lots of personality, then writing characters from tropes is okay with me. The problem I see is not a lot of people can pull this off and it's not a method I'd teach to new writers.

Write your character and then derive the tropes from that.

Let's use one of my own post-cyberpunk characters as an example. Keep in mind I mostly finalized this character and his backstory before I ever started visiting TV Tropes extensively.

Bronco Halligan.

He's a huge dude, 6'4" with 250 pounds of home-grown and vat-grown muscle on a titanium-laced skeleton. He's quiet, so most people mistake him for Dumb Muscle. I hate to say he subverts that trope, but he pretty much does, since he's actually fairly intelligent. That part of the character is based closely on one of my best friends. I guess that would also make him The Big Guy, except he's not part of a Five Cliche Band because that trope usually sucks. I'm sure there are more, there, but I can't think of any and don't want to.

He has been in multiple serious relationships, all of which have ended badly. I know we have a trope for that, but I can't find it. He's had nine daughters with five different women, which is Law of Inverse Fertility.

He's a mercenary, so there's Private Military Contractor right there. He usually has a beard, I suppose a Badass Beard, although calling that a trope is charitable. He generally has no problem killing people, so he's probably a Sociopathic Hero. He Would Never Hit A Girl.

And so on. I actually had to think about it to come up with those, and it can be a fun exercise. But I never planned on him having specific traits just to have them, to check off a list and to arrogantly fill a works page on the Unpublished namespace. Building a character on tropes is setting yourself up for failure and ridicule.

To further address the topic, if there's one thing you absolutely do not want to do when writing, it's to approach it with a workbench mindset like this, where each tool has a specific use and is going to be used the same way each time. Sure you might have a lot of tools that you can pick and choose from, but you're still limited by what you have and the specific functions each tool can perform.

Get away from that. It's poisonous. Writing is something all to its own. Just get the words out on the paper. Write your rough draft. Realize that it's shit and revise. Share it with others to get feedback and criticism. Realize that it's still shit. Keep on revising and sharing until it stops being shit. Read literature. Watch movies. Expand your horizons.

ALSO DO NOT USE TERMS LIKE "DECONSTRUCTION" AND "SUBVERSION". THEY ARE NOT CLEVER.

edited 21st May '12 2:10:07 PM by KaiserMazoku

How to make a character from tropes:

DON'T.

Tropes are trends that you notice in media and characters after the fact. They might not be intended, but since certain conventions in storytelling are done unconsciously, they will show up.

Trying to build a character from something that hasn't been noticed about them yet is working backwards.

I'm inclined to call bullshit. I see a lot of knee-jerk overreaction to this, I think caused by people feeling self-conscious about things that TV Tropes critics have said, and from seeing the attempts of a lot of bad wannabe authors.

Guess what? Bad authors are bad. They would be bad regardless. This site may be to some degree encouraging those without experience to try writing, but I doubt it and even if it were true, I don't see the point in trying to say "Only those who already know what they're doing should even try to write". Pretty much everyone has written some juvenile, ill-conceived, derivative crap in their larval stages.

What are tropes? Repeated, meaningful patterns in fiction. Maybe not highly meaningful, but beyond the obvious. You'll be using some of those. Do you have a protagonist? That's a trope. Three-act structure? Likewise.

It would be foolish indeed to stipulate that people can think ahead of time about the role that a character will play in their fiction only if they don't use our names for them.

Of course, there are common pitfalls, the biggest of which is to just view one's characters in terms of the role they have in the work. rather than conceiving of them as complete individuals ; another is to think of a list of tropes as being exhaustive, of containing all the ideas one might ever want to use.

I'm with Morven over all.

Specifically

I think only slightly better is giving a single definitive trait. People are more than a single trait. They may have a sort of default response to things that happen, but they are by definition more complex than that. And often hypocritical in many ways, so you shouldn't fret too much about them being contradictory. It's also important to look into how somebody with a roll would come to that role.

I don't think it's an impossible method either. Arguing against tropes is in effect arguing against the ability to create work from a prompt. (Although I should note that the idea "only those who know how to write should try to write" would seem to be an argument for tropes since working directly from tropes implies a certain familiarity with writing's patterns.)

However, the idea the constructing with tropes is equally valid to constructing without them is also problematic since they impose certain strictures, both on the story in the hands of a poor writer and on the way the author thinks about the story regardless of skill.

Everything that makes a story may be a valid method, but that doesn't mean some of them are not more prone to leading into error than others.

edited 21st May '12 7:24:12 PM by Night