"Tricks of the trade for writing fiction?"

I'm confused.

(I looked for a thread with a similar topic, but I could not find one. If there is one, or I should have posted it somewhere else, please let me know.)

In Writer's Block, there are a plethora of conversations on how to use tropes or how to not use tropes. It seems to me there are two basic schools of thought involved:

1) Tropes are tools that can/should be used in writing, to create characters or settings or plots.

2) Tropes are not building blocks, but tools used after a story is written to analyze and explain the characters, settings, and plots.

It seems that every time someone talks about "How to write with X trope", several people say, "That's not how you should write. Use tropes afterwards to analyze and explain your story, not to build it."

I read a post in another thread that made me think of the home page and the quote I used in the thread title. Basically, someone said "The point of TV Tropes isn't 'this is how you should write' but rather 'look at these cool characters and ideas and stuff!'"

Fair enough. I agree with that. But if you go to the home page, the first thing I notice is this line:

What is this about? This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction.

Could this be where some of the confusion/conflict comes from? The home page seems to suggest that tropes are tools that can/should be used in writing - it calls them "tricks of the trade." So...are they? Is that sentence accurate? Or am I simply missing the point of the sentence?

Personally, "tricks of the trade" carries the idea of something that is often used and should be used often. Am I missing something?

I'm not suggesting (at least, not in this thread) that the home page needs to be changed. I just thought it was a point that deserves making - the TV Tropes home page seems to contradict what a lot of posters in Writer's Block are saying.

Thoughts? Arguments? Comments of any sort?

The TVT home page was written by someone who had not considered the technical process of writing (like most of the site), and assumed that tropes cataloged here represent some form established methodology for writers.

They're a classic example of the human mind looking for patterns and finding them. And while I'm loathe to argue there aren't real patterns here, whoever found them decided that they meant something; that there was some secret writer's knowledge at work to create them, they they represented something conciously employed rather than being basic descriptors (Heel and Face and Mook and their relatives, Wave Motion Gun, More Dakka, among others) or aspects of the human psyche and experience (pretty much everything that's not a descriptor).

They were wrong.

edited 7th May '12 5:49:54 PM by Night

Tropes are not Lego blocks. I get that.

Either the main page is phrased poorly or the person who wrote it didn't understand what the wiki was actually about. Is that what you're saying? You're basically saying the site itself is flawed (or a large part of it is) in the way it presents and deals with tropes. Am I reading you right?

That's an opinion/argument I can understand - I'm not sure I agree with it 100%, but it does make a lot of sense.

I think it really depends on your perspective. Very few writers would ever say that you should write by combining a bunch of your favorite tropes together and hope an entertaining story comes out. Yet it is impossible to write without tropes.

Tropes Are Tools. You use them whether you mean to or not. I doubt the home page was trying to suggest that writers make the conscious choice to include certain tropes in their work, but they do regardless. It doesn't matter if an author knows if there's a term for it or how it's used in other stories, an author is going to want to use certain tropes to make their story work. An author isn't likely to go "I want to write a story with a Heel–Face Turn", but they're probably going to say "It would make sense for the bad guy to turn good at this point". They're using a tool, whether they realize it or not. I feel like that's all the home page is trying to say, not that authors can't write unless they study the site and put all the right pieces in the right place.

Basically, the entire concept of tropes works from a literary analysis standpoint. Like observing something from the outside, if you may. It just doesn't really translate to a writer's standpoint, which involves actually working with these supposed patterns. As you probably know, simply watching something is not going to provide the same viewpoint as working with it will.

@reset: Actually, I'd say just the guy who wrote that part of the front page is wrong. For most of the rest of the site it's a nonissue. Most trope pages don't pretend to tell the secrets of writing, they just describe something and go "here are places it happened".

This; they're "tricks of the trade" because they're used in fiction, not because the authors looked them up on TV Tropes.

That sentence on the front page bothers me too.

As a writer, I think this very wiki is pretty great for sparking off ideas and inspiration, but do I "use" tropes in my writing? No. Like a lot of other people in this thread, I think tropes are something you find and analyse after the fact, not prescriptive building-blocks of fiction.

@Wacky Meets Practical: That makes a lot of sense.

@Night: Oh, okay. Your line about "the rest of the site" confused me.

@jewelleddragon: Excellent explanation/summary.

@Doktorvon: Glad I'm not the only one.

There's a lot of semantics here.

Writers choose to use tropes all the time—especially when we're talking about a commonly Enforced Trope, or a plot that is built around a Deconstruction. Visual media tends to deliberately pick tropes all of the time, because they have a limited time to convey information.

Or, let's put it this way. A guy says, "I totally want to make a superheroine. I want her to be badass, but still lady-like. She'll probably have a working relationship with her friend on the force, and both are totally hot for each other. Except he can't pursue it because he's a cop and she's a vigilante, and since she feels their love will never happen, she pretends to hate him."

So let's count the tropes he specifically chose to use:

• Superhero
• Action Girl
• Badass
• Lady of War
• Commissioner Gordon
• Friend on the Force
• Unresolved Sexual Tension
• Cannot Spit It Out
• Dating Catwoman
• Star-Crossed Lovers
• Tsundere

edited 8th May '12 9:47:51 AM by KingZeal

That said, characters as characters should not be defined solely by the tropes that they are "supposed" to fit into, particularly from a writing perspective.

@ post 2

As always I am in full opposition to this and see no issues with tropes as building blocks. As that's what they are, in addition to being a tools, since Tropes Are Flexible.

You'll find that most published writers are also very aware of this fact.

Meaningless points to this person, folks - this is so much more on-target then either of the "tropes are LEGO" or "the front page is wrong!" arguments.

Although I still maintain that the author who does go "I want to write a story with a Heel–Face Turn" is wrong, unless they're doing it for a prompt or something.

If I wander around asking published writers about TV Tropes, do you have any idea of the scorn I could probably harvest telling them it's a writing tool? Actually I'll save you the trouble: I have bounced this off published writers before and known others to do so; they are indeed immensely scornful of the idea.

It's an explanation tool; a shorthand. Tools to talk about writing. Not to do writing with.

edited 8th May '12 6:25:25 PM by Night

About about tv tropes maybe about Tropes in general. No, those are Older Than Steam. That's why you hear them brought up so often in writing articles and in college classes and on author's personal sites. And not in an after the fact way as you claim it to be.

edited 8th May '12 6:39:34 PM by Vyctorian

The existence of a trope in itself requires a predictable pattern that can be pointed to in multiple works.

Tropes can't exist without first being written, many times, enough for people to notice them and notice that they form patterns throughout multiple works. You don't make tropes, you find tropes. That's how they're recognized as tropes.

edited 8th May '12 6:46:12 PM by Night

And once recognized there is no issues with saying "Hey, I wanna use something like that in my story". Everything we do is remix, whether you admit or not.

And regurgitation of things seen is going to take you so far. Perhaps.

You formalize it into a system (tropes) which is by its nature incomplete; which by its nature does not cover many items; which by its nature reduces things to only one specific level of complexity; not the very simple nor the very hard.

edited 8th May '12 6:52:39 PM by Night

Yes, it will. It's taken and propelled humanity forward for our entire exist and will continue to do so.

We can take tropes subvert them, invert them, deconstruct them, reconstruct them, re-appropriate them, but we still use them as building blocks. We always have.

edited 8th May '12 6:57:46 PM by Vyctorian

Actually, there are issues, if that's all you're saying. It's why I said that this

is wrong, but not this:

Not because there's something wrong with thinking "Heel–Face Turn" instead of "villain turns good", but because in the second example, the hypothetical author is thinking about their story and what makes sense for it. The first example, on the other hand, is just using a trope 'because'.

edited 8th May '12 6:58:32 PM by nrjxll

No. It hasn't. The great comparable system would be science and mathematics; but they acknowledge there are things unknown and (Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Hesienburg's Uncertainty Principle, etc.) unknowable.

But you are instead proposing that they should stop admitting this and use only what exists. We would still be in caves by that reckoning; most of our tropes would not exist, for their real counterparts would not, and we would not dream of spaceships or laser weapons or the like.

Tropes are tools, perhaps. But they are not a complete set of them, and one may not produce a work of complexity and quality purely by using them. You ask us to discard all but three of our chisels; but two of our pens; to render without normal maps or to play the video without sound. Tropes are limited in what they can define.

edited 8th May '12 7:00:20 PM by Night

I'm really getting tired of this "this is wrong" attitude a lot of tropers have. No, it isn't wrong, nor is it bad a way to write. It is simply something you either don't like or don't want to admit that other people use. And if you don't like that's fine, But fact is it is not "Wrong!"

Actually science and math are built upon others as a well:

And I'm not saying they are limited in what they can define we can stretch and change and be "creative" with tropes/ character archtypes/ plot-lines/ whatever you call them to make them seem different but that's all we're really doing.

edited 8th May '12 7:05:42 PM by Vyctorian

It should be noted that Vyctorian, so far as I can see, does not define "tropes" solely as those listed by this site.

Not that I agree with some of his other points, especially this "opinions are spehzul" attitude.

edited 8th May '12 7:01:45 PM by nrjxll

Even so, tropes in themselves are still limited since they are both interpreted out of existing works regardless of whether we have them here, and convey specific patterns of events or behavior without nuance or even really justification.

Even the most generous interpretation leaves you with a lot of filling in to do, spackle to slap onto the story.

EDIT: And you're only proving you don't understand the point, Vyctorian; tropes are what is. There was a time when they were not, as most of science and math as knowledge was also at one time not. You want to stop the production of things that are not already codified, so you will stop the production of things to codify. You only prove you didn't understand my point.

edited 8th May '12 7:08:58 PM by Night

I understand your point, but you seem to misunderstand mine and say I am saying things I'm not via hyperbole and exaggeration. You assume to much and make a false me in your arguments. Though perhaps this is my fault in part.

Yes, in the beginning there was nothing and we did make observations that were original if you will. And we have both added new stuff and built upon the original, but I grow weary of your vilification of the idea of tropes as building blocks in addition to being tools, there is nothing wrong with this idea at all.

edited 8th May '12 7:16:51 PM by Vyctorian