Do you use TV Tropes for writing prompts?

By that question I don't mean using the story generator. What I mean is searching for an individual trope and writing something about it.

I'm an amateur writer, but sometimes it's hard for me form an idea for a story. I tried using the story generator a few times but it was just too complicated for me, not to mention I had to do some research on each one. So I picked the one out of the seven that stood out to me did a writing session about it. Because of that I found that writing about an individual trope worked much better for me than letting a generator randomly select seven different ones for me to make a story.

I don't know why I posted this, but I just wanted an opinion on using TV Tropes as inspiration for stories. What do you think?

edited 9th Jan '18 7:00:44 PM by couchpotato

I've actually written my first standalone story strictly using the tropes that I got from the Story Generator as a Self-Imposed Challenge of sorts. It helped that they weren't conflicting and kinda fit a singular theme. It turned out pretty well. Working on it gave me a good enough starting point that now I have enough ideas to spin a whole series from it (and actually working on it now).

Or, more accurately, I don't know if it's common in the West, but when we were kids, one of our pastimes was that we were trying to grow a salt crystal. You take a glassful of warm water, dissolve a shitload of salt in it, suspend a weight on a rope in the center of the glass, and put the glass in a warm place. The salt in the water would in time condense on the weight, forming a solid crystal.

The tropes I got from the Story Generator acted like a weight for the ideas buzzing inside my head at that moment.

edited 10th Jan '18 6:17:17 AM by Millership

My current body of work, as well as the real start of my writing 'career', was actually unintentionally born from a Wiki Walk back in 2007. Shortly after I found this place, I read through the Parental Issues index and created a character who was Promoted to Parent. That character, as well as all of the others I created and the setting I put him in, have all changed so much as to present a Ship of Theseus sort of situation, but that's where it all started.

Now that I have a constructed setting and a good number of characters to work with, TV Tropes pretty much almost always comes later in the creative process, if it comes in at all. I'll get inspired by other media or my own life, and if I'm having trouble conceptualizing an idea, then I'll look it up on TVT to see how other media has done what I'm thinking of. However, I'm finding in recent times that more and more of my ideas aren't really tropable.

I've thought about it from time to time, but I don't think I've actually written a story based on a trope from this site.

Well, I do use TV Tropes as reference during writing, but most of the time, prompts just come out of my head. My stories (well my ideas) nowadays either deconstructing many idealistic tropes or just lacks any tropes

I know what stories I want to tell, but sometimes, this site gives me hints on how to express something or on how not to express it.