As we enter the dog days of summer, I am puzzling over the word trope. According to Merriam-Webster, a trope can be either: a: a word or expression used in a figurative sense : FIGURE OF SPEECH b : a common or overused theme or device : CLICHÉ
Should a word have two opposite meanings? When someone tells me that I have a trope in my writing, I want to know: Is it a good thing—like a metaphor or simile—or is it a bad thing—a cliché? Why does it have to be both definitions? What breed of dog is a trope? Is it definition A: a friendly golden retriever like my sweet Josie? Or B: my neighbor’s pug that patrols the fence with ferocity?
The first time someone used the word trope to describe my writing, I wasn’t sure if she meant a or b. The trailer court setting of my young adult novel in progress was “a trope for poverty,” she said.
I’d set the scene in a place where I’d spent some of my early years. I didn’t have to invent details. I could just recall them. I remembered roaming the main gravel road of that trailer court with my sister, playing games like counting blue cars and collecting discarded soda cans. I remember hunger and neglect. I remembered—yes—poverty.
While I respected the writer and her feedback, I thought I was simply recording the truth of my life. I could envision my main character there in the setting, and I could feel what she felt. I didn’t have much distance from her.
But I learned that just because something is a lived experience and deeply familiar to me doesn’t mean that it will translate to the reader in the same way.
For the reader, it might feel as if I were handing them an image of poor folk that reader had read in other books, seen in TV shows and movies. Never mind that it was my truth.
I decided to become friends with the pugnacious trope. Since that first experience, I’ve learned that writers who traffic in tropes are not necessarily doing something bad. They’re delivering what a reader expects to find in a certain genre. When used consciously and deliberately, writers can deliver to readers more than what they expect when they encounter a genre. For example…
A trope in a romance novel is enemies-to-lovers. Think Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Readers expect to encounter that trope so turning it on its head or adding some juicy complication is a way to flavor it differently. You might try friends to enemies to lovers!
Another trope is the lonely tough cowboy of the Western. Brokeback Mountain, E. Annie Proulx’s short story, tells a different kind of story, a love Western. In it the two cowboys might exhibit a tough exterior, but their facades crack in each other’s arms.
Horror tropes abound! My sister loved reading scary gothic mysteries that featured girls fleeing from mysterious mansions and one light on. I should have known it was a trope—so many book covers feature that image. Another way of having fun with a horror trope is to satirize it. What scared readers in the original might make them giggle if you lay it on thick. I imagine the hook-handed killer trying to pick up his dropped cell phone.
I have since revisited my young adult novel. I didn’t change the trailer court setting. Instead, I focused on developing the characters who live in that trailer court. I created a character who is my main character’s neighbor across the gravel road. Unlike my main character’s mother, this neighbor kept her home immaculate, planted a border of Gerber daisies in her yard, and baked seeded bread that she sold at a local co-op. Her home was the one to which my character fled one night, escaping the true poverty of her situation.
I hope you’ll find a way to engage with tropes too. A trope can become something richer and more surprising for the reader. Try drilling into the generality of the trope until you find some new layer.