You’re reading a book and you feel you already know this hero, or you’re certain that the girl and the dark brooding gentleman will get together. This common experience is to do with genre conventions and tropes. Tropes define genres.
The Call to Action in adventure stories, the Second Chance in romance stories, the Locked Room Murder in detective stories, or the Showdown in Westerns are all examples of such tropes. They tell the reader what to expect of the story. In other words, they’re bound up with the conventions of genres.
Differing definitions of tropes
What is a trope? Like most things in the writing game, there is no agreed usage of the concept.
Definitions fall into two broad classes:
- Firstly, that a trope is a figure of speech, twisting the literal meaning of a word or phrase into something else (What is a Trope? Definition, Examples of Tropes in Literature – Writing Explained);
- Or, secondly, that a trope is an archetype, setting, or key event that define a particular genre—a motif that recurs often throughout the genre (What is a Trope? See also Trope | The Poetry Foundation)
These two definitions descend respectively from the Latin tropus (figure of speech) and the Greek tropos (a turn, direction, way; fashion, manner).
I’m not going to spend more time on the first group of definitions. A metaphor, for example, is a trope in this sense, and “figure of speech” tells us perfectly clearly what kind of literary device it is without resorting to “trope”.
The second category is more interesting. Tropes are a kind of shorthand that help the reader understand characters, situations and conflicts without extensive exposition. In short, tropes define genres.
Tropes perform various functions
- Provide familiar story elements, offering well-trodden paths that help the reader locate what kind of world they’re in.
- Reflect and evoke cultural values and assumptions. An author may use them to reinforce or to critique those values.
- Anticipate outcomes and resolutions. Once in the grip of a trope the reader expects the story will unfold in defined ways. For example, if the story is a romance, it will end with a HEA (Happy Ever After) or a HFN (Happy for Now)
Examples of tropes in this sense include (an entertaining list can be found in The Ultimate Book Tropes List: 60+ Tropes in Literature:
Romance
- Enemies to Lovers
- Second Chance
- The Love Triangle
Fantasy
- The Chosen One
- The Call to Acton
- The Quest
YA
- Found Family
- First Love
- The Underdog
Mystery
- The Locked Room Mystery
- The Country House Murder
- The Amateur Sleuth
Science Fiction
- Alien Invasion
- Tech vs Nature
- The Mad Scientist
Tropes and surprise
Surprise is, of course, a necessary part of reading pleasure. If things turn out exactly as we expect (apart from, perhaps in the romance genre) we are disappointed. So the writer must use tropes with care and creativity. The reader in a particular genre expects the story to contain the genre’s defining elements. The author’s skill comes in twisting those conventions in unexpected directions. An overused trope becomes a cliché, with no power to surprise. Arguably, this happened with the vogue for vampire fantasy romance stories pioneered by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series in the 2000s.
You can also, more dangerously, use tropes to set up genre expectations and then flip them. Here’s an example of one of my flash fictions pieces that does so.
Squinting into the sun, I moved the cheroot to the corner of my mouth, chomping down. I shrugged back the poncho, and my fingers flickered by my thigh. The stranger stood tall and unmoving, waiting for me to make my move. Everything went slow, and the train’s hoot at the station offered a mournful chorus to the folks fleeing town. A silky baritone sang “Oh don’t forsake me, oh my darlin’.”
A knowing smile flickered across the stranger’s face. He recognised the game we were playing. Perhaps he too had just been dumped. I hurried onto the platform.
The opening has all the tropes of a Western and references the film High Noon. But the final paragraph flips this as we realise it’s the narrator’s fantasy created to cope with being dumped by a lover.
Tropes and motifs
Tropes recur and are generally understood within a culture as symbolising a cluster of meanings.
Motifs also recur. If they are specific to the symbol system of one author or text they can only be understood through discovering their meaning in the text. An example here would be the green light in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. But many motifs are widely shared within a culture. An example would be the red rose of love. Are these, then, tropes?
They may reinforce tropes (for example, the tall dark stranger is quite likely to turn out to be the love interest in a romance). But they are not tropes. A motif is a specific symbol not a full narrative signposting.
Neil MacDonald Author 