6 Villainous Character Types Infographic

 

15 Action/Adventure Tropes That Need To Die a Painful Death

Tropes. Ya gotta luv 'em. Without them, we'd have no shorthand to convey information with pages of unnecessary narration that disrupts the flow of our stories. Based on stereotypes and cliches, they can help and they can hurt. When they help, it only bolsters the "contract" between writer and reader. When they hurt, they can say things about both the writer and the work you may not like. The trouble is, usually, that they weren't intentional. It's just that the trope popped into your head without really thinking about it and you followed it to develop your story. 

The following list is 15 such tropes that I believe need to die a painful death, and none too soon. 

In addition to my list below, are there any that really grate you like sand at the beach? Let me know in the comments below. 

Sexist Tropes

1. Women are only good story fodder for being loved and being saved. 

Thankfully, I see lots of evidence of this one changing, at least in commercial fiction from the big publishing houses. That's because they follow marketing trends and realize the world isn't the same place it was in the 1930s or 1950s (even much of the 1970s). However, I still see a lot of this used in independent and small-to-midsize houses that are trying to recapture the glory days of men's fiction. Guys, you can still be heroes without every woman in sight becoming the damsel in distress or love interest. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Twist it a little. Have the guy who sees every woman as a potential date get labeled a misogynist or creeper. Have the dude who assumes the woman is in trouble get his ass handed to him and have to be saved by her occasionally. Share the time as the hostage between the sexes to keep it balanced. Write heroic women instead of heroic men as your next protagonist. 

2. Men who punch and shoot their way out of problems are the only real men. 

This one is also a throwback to earlier adventure fiction, but it hasn't begun to show signs of fading. Today's TV and movies (not just books) are filled with the macho types who (while they might also have a brain) primarily use their fists and firearms to solve problems. Again, the world has changed and no matter what morons on Twitter (I'm still not calling it X) say, this outdated idea of the alpha male is no longer the prevailing goal for men. Men can be smart and caring too, and can even refuse to throw a punch. It won't make them less heroic. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Have the male hero use strategy and deduction rather than threats and fights to get what he's searching for. Watch a procedural thriller rather than a Jason Statham shoot-em-up next time you feel like taking in a movie. Have the smart guy in your story get the win and the glory. Embrace the regular guy as a hero. 

3. The ability to kick, punch, or shoot are the only skills that make one an adventure hero. 

This one is hot on the heels of the previous one, but it applies not only to males but to females as well. As the action/adventure genre started to change, they only updated the window dressing. Instead of kick-ass men beating the shit out of villains, writers created kick-ass women beating the shit out of villains. A side problem this has created is the "ball-buster" heroine who exists only to make men feel emasculated. Now, don't get me wrong, way too many incels feel that just about any powerful female character who doesn't need a man is a ball-buster, AND THEY'RE WRONG. Anyway, back to the point... there are far more heroic qualities than physical strength and military prowess. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: It's similar to the ways mentioned above. Avoid writing women as men inside. Try to avoid writing men as cavemen inside. Embrace the other attributes of heroism such as honesty, loyalty, strategy, bravery, etc. 

Homophobic Tropes

4. The gay best friend.

This one was a necessary stop-gap that initially helped writers and publishers embrace diversity and include gay and lesbian characters in their work. But it became more of a stop-period instead of a stop-gap. Writers and filmmakers became satisfied with gay side characters, in much the same way black characters started off relegated to servant or sidekick roles in books and movies. I'm convinced this trope remains primarily because it can be a safety net to keep writers from embracing the LGBTQIA+ character as the hero instead of a sideline character while still ticking a diversity box.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Go whole hog. Let the LGBTQIA+ character take the spotlight and be the protagonist. But do your homework. Don't write a stereotype. (Of course, this applies not to just protagonists but side characters as well. Don't be satisfied writing stereotypes. Talk to people. Get to know them.) Or write characters (main or otherwise) who are allies to the community or in their baby steps of learning to change if you don't feel you can do justice to writing a member of the community directly in an honest way. 

5. All LGBTQIA+ characters must have at least one stereotypical trait so "norms" can tell they're not hetero.

This one was a shorthand that helped the writers who took advantage of the "gay best friend" tope. Remember that bit about getting to know people and doing your homework as a writer? Well, they didn't. Singling out certain so-called "flaming" traits allowed some writers to include gay caricatures without actually including gay characters. It was the equivalent of writing black men known only by their basketball prowess or lengthy endowments. It was, in a word, total bullshit. A high-pitched voice, coifed hair, or a bit of a swagger when you walk does not a gay character make. We need to do better.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: This one is so easy. Step out of your comfort zone if needed. Get to know people. Learn that people are just people. Then write them that way. After all, there's no way all straight characters would want to be identified by bad hair or constantly lusting for each member of the opposite sex they encounter.

Racist Tropes

6. Skin tone or nationality has any bearing on the quality of one's character. 

You would think this one would have died a long time ago, but sadly, traces of it remain. It's particularly easy to vilify someone of a nation your country sees as an enemy. In the '40s Nazis were an easy way to create a villain without having to give them any other traits than just being a Nazi. Some of that kind of thing is considered okay, but when just being German or just having a different pigmentation is your marker for being either a villain or even being a sort of saintly hero (simply by virtue of birth), that was what my kids like to call a "no bueno." It's more often applied to characters of Middle Eastern descent (the Muslim terrorist) today, particularly in thrillers. Or even the "Mexican Cartel" stereotype. The "noble savage" is a particularly overzealous usage of this trope, as if the addition of the word "noble" makes it any less offensive. On the other hand, assuming a lower character or intelligence for a dark-skinned or Asian character is more straightforwardly vile. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Stop. Just stop. Period. Stop it. Don't be an asshole. If you remotely think that this is a justifiable way to portray someone's internal character, go take some classes in being a good human being. A caveat -- if you are writing asshole characters, it's okay to let them think this way, but don't make it an admirable trait. 

7. The white savior. 

This one is an old one, but it still sticks around. We can trace it back to early adventure stories like She and Tarzan all the way to newer stories like Dances with Wolves, Avatar, and The Last Samurai. It started as a way for European writers to tell exciting stories about exotic locales while not having to learn much about the populations in those locales. It became terribly prominent in the world of comic books as well, with everyone from Sheena to Iron Fist embracing this trope. It actually has roots in the missionary zeal of early Protestantism, where "selfless" white men risked life and limb to go take the gospel to native peoples, all the while seeing them as a sort of lesser being in need of white culture and white religion to reach a higher, more civilized peak. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Flip it over on its ear. Have the so-called "exotic" be the savior to a group of white people. Have a member of the indigenous group rise up as the hero instead of having to bring in an outsider at all. Have the white guy in a strange land be the learner only and not the savior. Or have the self-proclaimed savior be a fake (The Man Who Would Be King) or just so inadequate to the task that he/she/they do more harm than good. 

8. Indigenous locals are exotic and trigger some kind of "otherworld" intrigue. 

If there's an indigenous group, they are special to the story in some kind of magical, supernatural, or extraordinary manner. Even the fantastic Indiana Jones flicks embrace this overdone and racist trope. There are two ways of approaching this trope, both of which need to end. The first is to add an indigenous group to your story when you need a "lost civilization" to trigger your hero's story beyond the gates of, well, maybe not Hell, but Normal. The second is to hide the weirdness and have a big reveal later that just proves the hero should have been on high alert around such a "not-normal" group he/she/they encountered. Fantasy can get away with this trope more often than other adventure stories because fantasy writers aren't limited by human races and skin colors and cultures and can custom create worlds and peoples. Phantastes and Alice in Wonderland are fantastic examples of this, one using fairy beings and the other using a whimsical world of animals and other strange beings such as playing cards.

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Take the exotic out of indigenous. In order words, let them be your portal, but don't make them so other as to be weird. Let them be a normal small town with local businesses, not a voodoo village with people secreting the back alleys at night. Have the weird happen at home instead of "in a land far away." A lot of modern urban fantasy uses this fix effectively, such as Neverwhere.

Other Prejudiced Tropes

9. Priests/Clergy are always the villains.

As the world changes and becomes less religious (or at least less Christian) than it used to be, writers, who are particularly known for their more progressive ideas in many cases, started to turn the clergy into villains. We can see this in classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and in modern works like, well, the various evil nuns in horror films. Of course, there was noting wrong with the freedom to assign even the clergy the status of the bad guys. We see this in The Crucible and in the hundreds of witch-burning characters throughout the '60s Hammer explosion. The trouble comes with the trope's overuse. Nowadays, it's an automatic assumption that if there is a religious character (a priest, a preacher, a neighbor), he/she/they will be either the villain or at least a jerk. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: It's okay to write anyone -- anyone! -- as the hero or villain. But don't stick to one type as your go-to for either. Keep readers guessing. Play against the trope. Is the aloof, quiet priest genuine or is he hiding something sinister? Is the religious woman next door really as bad as she lets on or does she have a trauma that is causing her to act that way? Just like when it comes to race or gender, people are people. Don't let a prejudice against religion cause you to fall into writing stereotypes whenever people of faith show up in your work. 

10. The moral high ground is the most satisfying. 

This one is the opposite of the previous trope. This is the one where writers make the assumption (without realizing it, most often) that the character with the moral high ground (often religiously motivated regardless of faith) is the happiest and most satisfied one. It can also be that this character becomes the most altruistic one. The idea comes from the notion that a person of some belief is a better, or at least happier person. There are years of European history behind this thought so it's not going away anytime soon. Not only that, but it is also typically applied to Buddhism and other Asian religions. That's a potentially dangerous pairing of this trope and that of "the exotic indigenous people" trope. But they're both hogwash. Statistics tell us that religious people have similar percentages of depression and divorce. And often the person who takes the so-called moral high ground invites only more stress and self-doubt into his/her/their life. Often, this trope plays out with the "sage" character in non-fantasy stories, as a character presented as the morally upright one is able to help and guide the protagonist to the best choice in the journey. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Let your moral folks be wrong, even when they believe they are right. This doesn't mean necessarily making them villains, just letting them fail to be the sage. Make them have to learn a lesson along the way too, even if they're just side characters. Allow them not to have answers or to confess doubts. Allow them to hurt. Allow them to hurt so much that they end up hurting others. Let them be human. 

11. Heroes never make immoral choices. Villains never make moral ones.

This one I learned to avoid earlier as a writer. I had a writing mentor at the time share this helpful tidbit with me: Always give your hero at least one negative trait and always give your villain at least one positive trait. The same thing holds true for the choices your heroes and villains make.  I know it was en vogue in the days of yore for villains to be all bad with no redeeming qualities and heroes to be all good (with white hats and all), but when you do that, your story suffers. This is one of the things I so loved about Haggard's She. Ayesha is a tyrant, yes, but she loves deeply, and even that positive love is her downfall as it leads to intense jealousy. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: As my former mentor said, always give your hero at least one negative trait and always give your villain at least one positive trait. Let the hero choose selfishness, not always saintliness or even goodness. Let the villain choose benevolence, not always malevolence. Nobody is one thing and one thing only, no matter how easy that makes your plot. Think more deeply. Build more complex characters. 

Overdone Tropes

12. The chosen one. Period.

This is probably my most hated trope. I am so sick of the chosen one. Don't tell me Buffy the Vampire Slayer got it right. It was overdone long before that even (as good as that show was, it would have been just as good without the "In every generation..." speech in the intro). It's even worse when it's an almost messianic character. Spielberg, for example, will go out of his way and risk a good movie just so he can put a "Christ-figure" in it (look no further than ET the Extraterrestrial and AI: Artificial Intelligence). There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. But it has become the go-to story for fantasy and even some sci-fi nowadays. Need a plot for your epic novel series? Oh, you need a chosen one. IT'S JUST SO FREAKIN' OVERDONE. Can we please let Harry Potter and Wheel of Time be the nails in the coffin of this one and move on? Think of something new. Okay. Rant over. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: If you actually want to use this trope, please, for god's sake, flip it somehow and make it your bitch. Let the chosen one get the calling wrong as in Life of Brian or Wholly Moses. But I still feel it's best to skip the chosen one completely and have the "well, you were available and willing" one rise to the occasion instead. 

13. The unwilling hero who changes his/her/their mind to save the world.

Cozying up beside the chosen one is this way overcooked trope. It's not enough that he/she/they is chosen by prophecy or fate or God or the giant spaghetti monster from space, no, they also have to play out the same damn story in every novel, movie, and television series. It goes like this: 

What do you mean, I'm chosen?
I don't want to be chosen.
I'm going to run away and not be chosen.
Then I have a lightbulb moment and I change my mind.
Okay, I'm ready to be the chosen one now. 

OMG, there are other plots, you know. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: Burn it. Okay, I'm kidding. If you insist on walking this old road, do the unthinkable and have the chosen one accept the calling and fail... badly. Maybe the hero has to be saved by a sideline character. Maybe the chosen one is a dupe who is being public to protect the real chosen one. Let a non-chosen one be the protagonist and keep the chosen one off to the side as a peripheral character. 

14. Gunmen have an endless supply of bullets.

This one may be less of a trope and more of a cliche. But while everyone plays semantics, let's just say that Colonel Shoots-A-Lot should have run out of bullets, shells, cartridges, etc. by this point. That rifle doesn't hold that many bullets. That shotgun only shoots one or two shells at a time. And that automatic rifle runs out when the clip is empty. Besides, as a writer friend of mine pointed out recently, sometimes a reload scene can be cool too. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: This one has an easy fix. Make sure your hero has extra ammo. Then give him/her/them a place to hide to reload. If anything, this downbeat will build more of a wave of pacing into your action scene. A wave needs peaks and valleys, after all, and slowing down your prose for a reload could be the magic your story needed. 

15. Clever banter for the sake of being clever.

As much as I love the dialog of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tarantino films, it didn't take long for the talking everything about nothing to get old really fast. Dialog must serve your story. It must move the plot, show characterization, establish backstory or exposition, something!. If it can be easily cut from your story without affecting anything at all, well, if wasn't necessary. No matter how cutesy or witty it was. Now, that's not to say that characters can't talk around things that are important to them. Unlike in his poor imitations, that's what makes Tarantino's dialog work -- just like that of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. They understood that human beings will do almost anything to avoid talking about what's really on their minds. 

Ways to play off this trope to fix it: You only have two options to fix this one that I can see. (1) Cut it. Just deal with the pain and snip the hell out of it and toss it in the trash or save it for a story where it might actually matter. Or, (2) rework it to make it both witty AND needed. Let it be the thing your characters use to avoid the thing they really need to discuss to save their marriage or to deal with one betraying the other and defecting to the enemy, that kind of thing. 

Great Fiction: Inspired By or Reaction To (Or Both)?

There's no denying it. A lot of (I'd go so far as to say most) great fiction is either: 

[a] inspired by the idea of renewing or continuing something (like Gaiman does with his sort of fairy tale grown-up fantasies that read like children's fantasies or the pulp revivals)

[b] a reaction against something (like the Harlem Rennaissance and feminist literature of the sixties or the Beat Poets)

[c] a little of both (the remix notion of taking something old and making it new to the point the old fans most likely won't like it)

It's a bit heavier of a topic for one of our roundtables, but I'm curious where your body of work falls. 

Aside from esoteric ideas and nature, etc. what are the genres that appeal to you that you want to pick up on their tropes and see them continue through your own work? Which of those tropes and trappings mean the most to you and show up most often in your work?

Kay Iscah: The Seventh Night world is very much about folklore and fairytale tropes. I genre-hop a lot, so won't go into all my books and stories. And it would be another book of literary analysis to answer all these questions. So sticking with Seventh Night and one short story I've written called "The Magically Thinning Mirror" and hitting some main points.

Sean Taylor: Hands down, I love the tropes of sci-fi, horror, and superhero stories most of all. I love the way they so effortlessly settle into a sort of magical realism as people accept all the oddness that goes on around them and just move on with their lives. A guy shoots lightning from his eyes to fix a falling bridge? No problem. It's a Tuesday. A girl who holds her head at her side and talks with you about family secrets? Who cares? She seems nice enough. A friend who can slide between dimensions by tugging the strings of String Theory? Been there, done that. 

HC Playa: Sticking with what I both like and write, that would be fantasy with romance. Now, I have it on good authority that I do not, in fact, write romance (per multiple romance publishers). I write fantasy/adventures that just so happen to have some kissy-face stuff in them 😂. I like the world-building of fantasy, being transported to an entirely different world, be it high fantasy or urban. I also enjoy the human aspect of romance paired with the guarantee of a happy ending. Now, there's a place in fiction for sad and tragic endings. I, personally do not wish to write that most of the time. The world is harsh enough. I prefer to offer an escape. So I like going with larger-than-life protagonists, super capable, highly intelligent heroes. After all, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, and Bilbo Baggins are memorable BECAUSE they are extraordinary. I like the white knight or occasionally they are the tarnished knight...but ultimately good and love always wins.

Looking at those genres you love, what are the things about them that you try to push aside or ignore as a way to bring your own mark on them, or to make them important or apropos for modern audiences?

HC Playa: My heroes might think they are rolling in to save the heroine, but buckle up buckaroos, in my worlds, it's usually the heroines that do the real saving. There are no helpless, hapless damsels. Again, there's a place for that. Plenty of women love the damsel in distress being saved by a savvy, hot hero. One of the reasons I don't fit the romance genre is b/c my plots don't center on the absurd miscommunications and dating games that are central to a romance. If my heroine wants to know if the hero is interested she just asks...maybe it takes working up the nerve, or clever events that drop her hints (or him), but no silly games....after all, they are usually trying to save the world.

A lot of classic fantasy is from a male POV. A lot of romance features overbearing males who just need the right female to "tame" them. I got very tired of both of those things. It shouldn't be THAT groundbreaking for both the male and female protagonists to be badass in their own way and realize they make a great team when they communicate.

Now in newer works, I am expanding to queer relationships. That's a whole other box to unpack.

Kay Iscah: Despite the settings or fantastic magical elements people are people. So if their responses to the unreal feel realistic or natural the character tends to resonate with someone, if not everyone. Cultures and technologies change, but we still tell many of the same fairytales because they resonate with us on very fundamental levels. Escaping abuse, enduring hardships, traveling (or at least leaving home), finding or losing love, pursuing our passions, and longing for wealth (or at least financial stability) are all pretty universal.

Sean Taylor: What I hope most to move beyond in my preferred genres is the (what I call) sort of shallow storytelling that was painted in broad strokes and stereotypes, whether character or plot. I want to create worlds that smack of realism -- at least until the baby elephant grows wings and sings 12-bar blues standards. I want my stories to more accurately reflect the types of people I see on a daily basis. You can call that woke if you want to, but I call it reflecting the real. 

If I'm writing in a specific time period, like my 30s private eye, Rick Ruby, then I want to go deeper than the surface mysteries and tell the kind of stories that couldn't be told back then, whether because of race, gender, or sexual orientation of the characters or the kinds of goings-on in the plots. I want to take the tease of burlesque and racial tensions that made the back cover of the book to sell it but never really showed up inside and put it inside the stories where it belongs. 

What tropes or trappings does your work most try to change? Are there social issues you want to write about (without, you know, blatantly writing about) or stereotypes you intentionally set out to destroy (or for a lesser loaded word) dismantle in your work?

Sean Taylor: I kind of answered this one above, but I really want to write the kind of stories that people I know in my life now didn't have a chance to be written into back in the day. I want to see the pages fill up with non-white, non-straight people, not because I have a political agenda but because they didn't get the opportunity then, and if I can do something about that now... well, it may be too little, too late... but it's something I can do. So I plan to do it. Period.

HC Playa: By having my heroine do the saving, I turn that expectation on its head. I try to make my male characters in touch with their feelings...now occasionally they require a clue-by-four, which often comes by way of a helpful friend/relative/etc. pointing out their idiocy, but I try not to fall into toxic masculinity tropes. Even as a woman, it can be easy to paint what we are used to seeing and not realize we are perpetuating negative stereotypes. With regards to non-heteronormative characters, I (1) don't kill them off, try to show an array of diversity across my worlds, and show love as love.

How have you combined these ideas in single pieces of work before so that you are building and unbuilding at the same time in the same story?

Kay Iscah: "The Magically Thinning Mirror" is a short story written like a fairytale, but it's also a pretty blunt metaphor for anorexia, about a woman who wishes herself thinner until she vanishes altogether. However part of the point of fairytales and folklore is to deliver an idea or lesson without a lecture. You keep the story simple, leaving space for the reader to process their own thoughts on the topic. And by simplifying the story it can have secondary lessons like taking a good thing too far to the point it becomes bad, or not being satisfied with what you achieved.

Seventh Night comes from a bit more of a fractured fairytale tradition. It was inspired by the tone of The Princess Bride, which places fictional medieval-ish settings alongside more modern attitudes, but with heavier fantasy, particularly fairytale, elements. The main book is broken into three "Acts", which is intended to emphasize that the characters are all playing parts that don't necessarily fit who they are. The main book is about taking the characters through the tropes.

But I'm currently working on a set called "Before the Fairytale" which are prequel coming-of-age stories for the main characters in Seventh Night, more parallel stories than a series, so the style of writing shifts a bit in each story. "The Girl With No Name" follows the sorceress. She is a shapeshifter so there are a lot of themes of finding and building identity, but as her story is drenched in magic, the telling is in the style of an extended Grimm's fairytale. There's a gradual shift from less to more detail as the book goes on and she forms a stronger sense of self. But whereas Seventh Night tends built on a stack of tropes, "The Girl With No Name" sets them up and then sidesteps them.

"Horse Feathers" in contrast follows the stableboy whose life is mostly devoid of magic, so the writing style in his story is centered more on realism and descriptions of being stuck in the life of a medieval peasant when you are a nerd at heart. There are unicorns and pegasus (a word that is treated both as singular and plural like sheep), but in the world of Seventh Night, these are not considered magical creatures. "Horse Feathers" has a lot of focus on world-building, but it's the part of the fairytale that tends to get fast-forwarded like "He worked for the lord for seven years." There's a lot of groundwork for how Phillip gets to be the somewhat jaded dreamer or callous callow youth he is in Seventh Night. He actually has a fair bit of adventure, but being a dreamer, he doesn't recognize it as an adventure because it doesn't fit his more romantic notions.

The third book in the set which is written and edited but has had publishing delays is called "The Hidden Prince". While the setting is still a medieval-ish fairytale world, it incorporates a lot of elements of gothic literature including a bit of a murder mystery at the end. Again, this reflects a character who sees himself as a bit of a tragic hero.

The last one in the set will focus on the princess. It's called "Seven and 13", and it's about half-written. The format is a bit more of a series of vignettes, which are not my favorite thing to read but work for this character. I think of it a bit like writing in the style of a stained glass window, so it's about setting visually striking scenes but not much action. In a way, this one's a bit more personal, because it's a young girl navigating the world as a prosocial psychopath, though that terminology is never used, and I doubt many readers would make that connection. But being a thinker more than a feeler and the detachment that comes with that, or simply feeling perpetually out of place in your own life but not having other options.

HC Playa: I have and continue to play in different ways to explore the human experience of love whilst adventuring in pretend worlds.

Sean Taylor: The writers I love to read did this all the time and because of that I tend to do it too. Vonnegut wrote literary sci-fi. Bradbury blended sci-fi, fantasy, and horror almost into a new genre of his own. Gaiman uses the trappings of adult and children's fantasy to tell urban stories about people and their isolation from and longing for each other. 

So, yeah, I do that too. For example in my short story collection Show Me A Hero, which is filled with superhero stories, I have horror stories, adventure stories, romance stories, family drama stories, fantasy stories, and police procedurals. It comes with treating your genre as a setting with rules and bits and bobs, and then realizing you can tell all kinds of stories within that setting. I try not to think of genres as genres at all, but turn them into settings. That is why I can write a romance fantasy set in space during an invasion. That is why I can write a coming-of-age literary tale with a monster stalking the woods. That is why I can write a detective pulp tale that is a literary story with jazz as a metaphor for sexual preference. Writing's just more fun that way. 

Everything Old Is New Again -- Reviving Old-School Literary Tropes and Techniques for Contemporary Fiction

There are so many literary conventions that have fallen out of use -- or at least out of favor -- in modern fiction. You hear it all the time: Don't use infodumps, show don't tell, no page after page of description, don't jump heads, no omniscient narrators, etc.

With that in mind, there's only one question for this new writers roundtable...

What is your favorite of the old conventions or tropes to revisit, and how do you use it effectively for contemporary readers?

Amanda Niehaus-Hard: I think genre writers have been steadily incorporating more literary techniques into their writing, but instead of thinking of these things in academic terms, they’re often referred to as “easter eggs.” Allusion and parallelism in themes are there, but they aren’t called out as such.

One of the literary techniques that I miss in genre fiction is the omniscient narrator. What’s in favor right now is that very close limited point-of-view, where you’re plugged into the brain and sensory system of one character, and this can be extremely effective, especially in horror. This technique fell out of favor years ago, (even inside literary fiction) but YA authors are bringing it back, in a way, in the voice of a ghost narrator.  There’s a lot you can do with omniscience – especially in a longer work. Ellen Gilchrist is a contemporary literary author using the omniscient narrator to provide commentary on the story, even entering the story as a character herself. It’s a powerful tool that I’d like to see the genre community experiment with. 

Another technique that is not only out of favor, but often warned against by editors, is the use of multiple points-of-view (derisively called “head-hopping” in the romance community.) Now it’s true this is a technique that can get out of hand quickly, so authors are usually encouraged to limit point-of-view to alternating sections or chapters, or for shorter works alternating paragraphs. Virginia Woolf was the master of “head hopping,” so authors who want to experiment with this should look at how she handled it. I see it being much more effective in some genres than others. (In horror, sometimes the dread and sense of isolation can be enhanced by staying firmly inside the head of one character. With a larger fantasy series, being entirely in one mind can become tedious for the reader. Even books in the Harry Potter series play with this – pulling away from Harry’s direct experience as the series goes on, to give the reader an overall picture of the very-real problems both the Muggle and Wizarding worlds are about to confront.)

I do wish genre writers would consider what they could accomplish if they were as precise with language as some varieties of literary fiction authors. One aspect of lit fic (some would say the only important aspect) is the sound of the language, the rhythms of the sentences. Ray Bradbury was a genius at finding language that actually sounds like the thing he’s writing about. (Remember the scene in “Something Wicked This Way Comes” where the mirrors are breaking? Those sentences, read aloud, actually sound like breaking glass. It’s amazing.) Genre writers would be well-advised to pay as much attention to the pacing of the sentence as they do the pacing of the unfolding plot. Borrow and steal from poetry techniques, from Gertrude Stein. Borrow and steal from the language of Ulysses, of Borges and Calvino. 

Literary writers pride themselves on breaking with tradition, and I’d like to see more genre writers attempt the same. Ursula LeGuin was a proponent of breaking literary “rules” inside imaginative fiction. She encouraged writers of all stripes to overturn conventional ideas about “story,” even questioning the advice to build a story on “conflict.” Literary writers very often will craft short fiction that doesn’t follow Freitag’s pyramid or Aristotle’s Poetics. The story might end just before or just at the moment of the “crisis.” We might never see falling action or any kind of resolution. Try mapping LeGuin’s famous story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” on that pyramid. That story reads more like a sonnet, with a two-line turn at the end rather than an actual conflict/crisis/resolution structure.  Last month I read two different independent works advertised as short story collections, but that were really more like novels in fragments – a literary technique that I hadn’t seen in genre fiction. This excited me to no end. I’m seeing a lot more experimentation inside YA, where the phrase “novel in verse” isn’t looked on with suspicion but with delight. I would love to see genre writers experiment with structure and form the way literary authors do. Of course that’s a huge risk. The experiment might pay off or it might fail miserably. Ultimately your “art” still has to communicate enough to the reader to make the process of reading it worth their time. I imagine that for every story she places in The New Yorker, even Joyce Carol Oates has one or two that never see publication, and that’s okay.

Ultimately, fiction supplies us with an enormous tool box of techniques and devices we can use, and I don’t think we should necessarily limit ourselves to what’s in fashion today, or even what’s considered “the law” today. Tell a good story, use whatever methods you need to in order to do so, and don’t let how we currently view fiction limit how you see it. 


Rob Cerio: The infodump can still be done well, when presented in the proper literary device. One of the reasons I admire Douglas Adams so much is his use of the narrative tool of the hitchikers guide entries to do the infodumpingin the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Perry Constantine: I like omniscient narration, but it’s really tough to get right. I’ve done it myself on occassion, though I can’t say for sure if it’s been effective.

Gordon Dymowski: When I'm writing, I actively try to avoid obvious tropes. After all, part of storytelling should be as much in subverting the obvious direction as it is in straightforward storytelling. But there are two tropes that I think have been overused...and that I try to openly integrate into my storytelling in clever ways.

One is the Inevitable Corruption of The Hero. You know the drill -- the hero has a gun on the villain. The villain says "Kill me." The hero drops the gun and says, "If I kill you, I'm no better than you."

Not every hero is ethically pure, and I like the idea of temptation...but the whole I-won't-kill-you cliche is overplayed. But planting some smaller incidents of moral question help flesh out the hero's limits. After all, having the big twist doesn't make sense without some examples of how the hero can go wrong. Another (which I'm integrating into one of my current projects) is to suggest that the hero may cross that line...but less out of moral certainty and more out of their own self-destructive or morally righteous behavior.

(Note - I'm not spoiling anything; these are storytelling choices. Your mileage may vary).

The other is the ever-popular Romantic Triangle. Or to quote the J. Geils Band: "You love her, but she loves him/And he loves somebody else, you just can't win..."

Whether you grew up with 1980s romantic comedies...or even more popular current fare, you know how much this gets overplayed. And the approach, which leads to the "Stalking for Love" trope....just won't cut it with a modern audience.

Part of the way try to subvert this in my writing? Make sure that it's a triangle that has a healthier resolution. Perhaps one of the characters in the main couple realizes that their feelings aren't as strong. Or that the pursuer ends up finding strength through a strong friendship with the person that they desire. (Or even that the pursuer finds their feelings stem from some other inadequacy). It's also easy to fall into the lazy trope of having the pursuer...well, "keep tabs" on their desired one. It's much more interesting to focus on the internal struggle of someone who has feelings for someone but also has to acknowledge that the person does not share that feeling. Or even discuss such a relationship in a different historical context to create a unique set of dynamics.

Example: one of my current projects involved women in the 19th century. Extended friendships which involve hand-holding, some physical affection, and emotional intimacy led to strong relationships between women. So much so that the concept of a "Boston marriage" arose - this is a state where two women live together like a married couple normally would. (And given the historical context, this wasn't seen as problematic or "bad". It just was.) Having someone infatuated with a woman in a "Boston marriage" would give it added texture...and making the person infatuated a third woman might even give it more poignancy and grace.

But from a storytelling perspective, it would make it worth it, because sometimes subverting and reshaping well worn cliches provides for more effective storytelling options.

Bill Craig: Flashbacks are good places for exposition and infodumps.

Richard Laswell: I'm a fan of very detailed descriptions. Tolkien would not have been nearly as popular if his world was a vague shadow in the background. I'll likely get in trouble here but witness the difference between Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. I fully admit the Narnia books are vivid and entertaining, but more in an action thriller way than the rich sprawling tapestry of Middle Earth.

Michael Woods: I like the omniscient narrators. I like to tell some of my stories as if they are being told by a bard entertaining folk in a tavern or traveling show. Other times I like to be highly descriptive of the details. Never blend the two though. It makes for boring reads.

PJ Lozito: What I'm working on now revives the old saw of challenging the reader to guess the identity of a masked vigilante from a pool of possibles.