Is being Troperiffic a bad thing?

Considering that tropes as they're used on this site are pretty much "literally anything that happens in a work" that sort of goes without saying.

If this forum isn't for the purpose of helping each other improve as writers, what is it for?

It depends on who you're asking. In the end, it's mostly to help with ideas. Most people who are writing have to really find their own motivation to do so, but will use this forum as a way to help.

Or at least, that's what I assume.

I think a lot of us would love to see threads of this nature, but unfortunately, they seem to be discussion repellent around here. The threads with the highest post count are the ones in which people talk about their concepts, idea spam, show off their characters abilities, and make list after list. It seems that people are more drawn to proving (or attempting to prove) how big they can think, or how "great" their ideas are. But attempts at posting decent-to-good writing, or talking about is in/constitutes good writing or good writers, or getting help (and not of the "how do I make my giant explosion more explode-y" variety) are rare.

edited 4th Feb '12 1:23:47 PM by BetsyandtheFiveAvengers

So if I were to post the intro to my novel, that would be considered getting advice on good writing or Shameless Self-Promotion? Or what about posting an idea and looking for feedback? I feel like there's a line there, but I suppose with the right wording you can stop from crossing it.

^ If you want good critique on your stuff, then I recommend these forums: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/index.php I posted my stuff on there and got two line-edits and one general-impressions comment, which is more than you'll get in most places.

I find subtlety usually never works. I try subtlety, but I usually make it too subtle >_>

If you start a new thread, post the opening to your novel and ask for Con Crit, I'll do my best to hand it out. (Or, alternately, say: "You're clearly a better writer than I am, and this is out of my league to criticize"; most writers seem to be physically incapable of saying anything to this effect, for some reason). I don't think it'd be out of place at all.

I'd post /my/ writings for you people to criticize, but they're in Hebrew.

edited 4th Feb '12 4:06:32 PM by TripleElation

Plenty of people already have threads with their works. Spacetravel, Snowie, Forzare, Me...

No one would bat an eye if you did it.

edited 4th Feb '12 4:14:53 PM by MrAHR

Yeah, if you want constructive criticism, go ask for it.

@ Betsy This is partly why my default response to threads asking to "check out this idea" or "is this premise interesting?" is "write it out first".

And I agree with fanty — if you want to improve your writing, go visit other forums/websites too!

edited 4th Feb '12 9:07:23 PM by fillerdude

I was actually posting to see what was acceptable behavior in this subforum, since I'm new to Writer's Block. Maybe I'll give the concrit a go after this semester is over.

I just wanna say, if I ever used a trope , it will most likly either be inverted, subverted, averted, or deconstructed. I rarely deliberately use a trope for.the sake of using. As such, I sometimes want to avoid some cliches, while keeping others and then changing them to make them more interesting.

Short answer: No.

Long-ass answer that I probably shouldn't be writing at 10PM before the first day of class:

Tropes Are Tools, and a good writer will recognize the tools that they need for the story they want to tell. You can't just say "Am I using too many tropes?" You have to think about the story first, as many people have said earlier. It will naturally fall into at least a few tropes because stories are Older Than Print, but then you have to ask, "Will Trope Y enhance the story because it's related to Trope X, or should I get rid of them both and use Trope Z to make it easier?"

Moreover, a lot of troperiffic works just happen organically—not because the writer intentionally goes "I'M GONNA USE TROPE X, Y, AND Z BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS IN PLOT A," but because they write the story as well as they could and it started taking on patterns later.

For my story Takotsubo, I wanted to write about "an Asian-American kid who becomes a gangster because he thinks that's the only thing Asian-Americans can do, but he eventually realizes that he's a hero."

The more I poked around at my basic story (a Deconstruction of the Asian gangster stereotype), the more I had to think about all the things that my gangster Cord has to deal with. The Superhero Origin is deconstructed because while Cord goes through the exact same story that a lot of white superheroes do, he becomes a gangster because he's almost never seen Asian-American superheroes. (More specifically, Asian-American heroes who DON'T know kung fu.) Cord THINKS he's a Tragic Villain, but he never does anything villainous and that means he FUNCTIONS more like a Hurting Hero. The main theme of the story is how "You Are Better Than You Think You Are."

Cord never really makes a Heel–Face Turn from evil to good, because he was ALWAYS good—the point is getting him back from the Despair Event Horizon that he's been stuck in so he can ACKNOWLEDGE it. Hell, his alias is the Tin Man because I want to make it REALLY REALLY clear that this dude is not supposed to be a gangster. And while the story is definitely a Genre Deconstruction of the superhero genre's failings regarding race, I grew up with superheroes and I love the good parts of the genre. It starts out delineating just how badly the world broke Cord, but the Superhero Origin deconstruction starts looping into the REAL story when his family and friends put him back together through The Power of Love.

Look at all those tropes. I spent two hours hunting for them when I started to recognize patterns, and that is the difference between "a story that happens to be Troperiffic" and "cramming in as many tropes as possible."

Also, the work's page has EVEN MORE tropes.

edited 23rd Aug '16 12:26:10 AM by Sharysa

This thread is pretty old, but it's an interesting topic so... I have to say that I am sympathetic to the idea of trying to find patterns in stories you like so you can use them yourself. But I think that at the same time, you want to let a story take on a life of its own, and so overusing that approach can be a bit stultifying.

Having said that, I disagree with this statement from :

I disagree completely with the idea that once you have a story idea you have to then consider whether a particular trope will enhance or detract from it. There's no need to think consciously in terms of tropes. It depends what kind of story you want to write and how you want to write it.

edited 24th Aug '16 1:13:15 AM by editerguy

When I'm really, really into a story and I'm getting some serious work done on planning or actually writing it, I never think of the events or characters in terms of tropes. I just think of the elements in terms of... themselves.

When I demonstrated my protagonist as exceptionally strong and magic-adept for his kind and able to take five antimagic darts before going down, I also had him get captured in his backstory after getting shot with just one. I decided the one dart made sense because it was his first encounter with liquid antimagic, he'd just gotten into a fight with his spouse and was very upset, he'd run away alone to a secluded area to calm down without telling anybody where he was going, and the dart nailed him in the leg and he tripped and hit himself on a rock, buying his capturer more time to shoot him up with more darts. Only several weeks after writing the scene and generally feeling satisfied with it did I realize I'd invoked Worf Had the Flu.

And I'm finding more and more there's a lot of little bits and pieces to building a narrative that do carry narrative meaning and significance, but which have no trope equivalent. If I just thought of what needed to happen next in terms of actual trope names and didn't consider the elements on their own, I'd be in trouble. Hell, I tried that for a few years, and I got absolutely nowhere past daydreaming about tropes because I couldn't figure out how to get them to logically connect in the narrative.

Tv tropes is slowly ruining my life at this rate. After a stories of mine, I noticed something's a bit off until I realized there's a trope for that.

Why is consciously using tropes a bad thing? Yes, writing is one of those tricky things that nobody can seem to TRULY teach (a lot of people will take an average/mediocre plot and characters written superbly over an innovative plot written So Okay, It's Average), but skill will ALWAYS factor in, and half of that is "teaching people how and why to use X."

Also, sorry for the confusion: I didn't literally mean "once someone uses Plot A, they ABSOLUTELY NEED TO USE Tropes X, Y, and Z all the time." This is a thread about being Troperrific, so I was trying to explain how being troperrific can be done skillfully and not just a mindless jumble of tropes.

edited 24th Aug '16 4:41:04 PM by Sharysa

I guess I took you too literally, sorry about that.

I didn't mean to imply that consciously using tropes is a bad thing.

But I think there is an element of intuition and (for lack of a better word) emotion that can be stifled by deciding lots of tropes to use in a story in advance. At least personally, I find my writing flows more naturally and is more satisfying when I focus more on feelings I am trying to evoke with settings or characters.

I think that tropes are useful as conceptual guidelines, but setting a goal of including such and such tropes in a work seems too rigid and therefore counterproductive to me... if that makes sense.

I like something that CrystalGlacia said, because I feel the same way:

edited 25th Aug '16 8:20:08 AM by editerguy

I'm sure there are writers out there who know how to build a competent story and can also think in tropes as part of their storycrafting process, but I can't imagine they're common. I love this site, I've been here for eight years, and I've learned about so, so many narrative devices from this place, but since I've actually tried writing and building narratives by myself, trying to think in tropes is just an extra layer of abstraction that slows my process down for no good reason. Thinking in tropes compartmentalizes the events and elements of my writing into generic terms that don't get me thinking about how they connect and influence each other.

When I was just starting to write and tried thinking about my stuff in terms of tropes because this site blew my little newbie-writer mind, that's why I was never able to get past profiles and trope lists, even though my tropelists had paragraphs of context, even though my chosen tropes should have logically connected in theory, even though writing with tropes the only way I knew how to write at the time.

Perhaps thinking in tropes as part of the storycrafting process should be considered as just another technique to try out, like the Snowflake method, or outlining, or discovery writing, just one that's less common than most others. It's totally possible to get sidetracked outlining or building every little second of your characters' lives and histories just like how one might get sidetracked daydreaming about tropes. And like any writing technique that distracts you away from getting actual narrative content on the page, you should try something else if/when it doesn't work.

edited 25th Aug '16 12:14:13 PM by CrystalGlacia

Yeah, I pretty much agree. My viewpoint on this is that it's typically better to come up with a basic story idea first, and then see how tropes can apply to it once the idea's been fleshed out a bit.

At least that's how I typically do it anyway... plus I just like browsing the site and looking at a trope and thinking "Oh hey, this really fits Character X/World Y/Story Z of mine". I tend to put a lot of thought into my character development process especially, and what I find is that (usually) the more developed a character is, the more tropes I can find that would apply to them. And identifying those tropes helps me get a better perspective on the character and the story overall. Sometimes I've even gotten little story ideas from this process.

Which is why I think the Unpublished Works section of the Darth Wiki exists, and which is also why I created a page there for one of my own stories. I actually managed to come up with a good synopsis for said story there, while describing it and finding some tropes that would apply. Said page has gotten really long with ideas... some of which I came up with on the fly while thinking of a trope I thought I kinda sorta would apply.

As an aside, one of my stories revolves around a virtual world with Mons, and for whatever reason, I decided to name a couple of the attacks said creatures can use after tropes - specifically Agony Beam and Yin-Yang Bomb, so far. I even named a Mon after a trope: Shroomba, short for Mushroom Samba. I figured it was okay because these are details that just make it a bit Troperiffic, while not making the story itself seem cliched.

edited 25th Aug '16 10:52:55 PM by ladytanuki

I do discovery writing too

I make sure not to make a page for my works until I have them published in SOME manner. I tend to write organically myself, but with at least a LOOSE outline so I don't get stuck wondering how to get from Point A to Subplot B.

For me, tropes are a really useful shorthand. Being able to describe my plot in a couple of sentences is REALLY helpful.

Reading TV Tropes, especially when you first discover it, tends to influence the way you think as a writer. For the most part, you either come to the conclusion that "all of these works are bad because they use tropes!"^note Counterpoint: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the progenitor of TV Tropes, and Community, which used TV Tropes as reference material. or that "I can only make a good story if I use as many tropes as possible!"

Neither one is wholly the case. As the mantra goes, Tropes Are Tools, and as much as we throw that around it really is the best advice to have when reading this site.

However, I think it's worth pointing out another side of tropes that people often overlook: Tropes are Observations. It's impossible to launch a trope page on this site until you have a bare-minimum list of 3 examples. This means that for a trope to be recognized on the site, it has to occur organically in the writing world.

And consider that even if a writer ignores the existence of tropes (or even actively defies them) they're still going to subconsciously infuse their work with tropes because for a story to be good it has to be at least a little predictable. For a story to be predictable it has to build on other stories. When a story builds on other stories they're creating a work with tropes.

Also, to @ewolf2015:

TV Tropes Will Enhance Your Life too, if you let it. I don't know what stage of life you're at (school? work? retired? who knows! doesn't matter) but I've found that TV Tropes can add depth to the world that you never knew existed. Once you get past the initial shock of "good lord, this is a thing?" — and trust me, there will come a point where you'll stop being surprised (and maybe even bored) by common writer tricks — that's when you're free to gain a deeper appreciation for the finer details that the true masters infuse into their art.

So give it time. You'll grow to love fiction again. And when you do, it'll be an even deeper love than before you discovered this site because — and forgive me for using the cliche — The World Is Just Awesome.

edited 26th Aug '16 1:12:07 PM by AwSamWeston

Um, guys necroing a thread isn't exactly encouraged.

Talk about Mood Whiplash.