Tropes I’m Tired Of

Trite Truisms to Take Out With Yesterday’s Garbage

Today I’m looking forward to trashing some timeworn tropes with you.

Most people will understand what I mean when I say tropes but the term has a couple of different meanings when it comes to literature so I’ll clarify. If you studied literature or rhetoric in college, somebody probably taught you the formal definition of a literary trope: The use of figurative language for artistic effect. There’s a long list of Latin words for these; some of them are recognizable, like metaphor and hyperbole, and some of them are pretty obscure, like paralipsis or litotes.

Anyway, that’s not the kind of trope I am talking about today. I’m talking about commonly recurring plot points and motifs. Not entire plots or stories, now—I’m a firm believer that any story can be retold in a fresh way. Humankind is only working with seven or eight basic plots. Specifically, parts of stories, scenes, motives, personalities, things like that. 

For instance: Have you ever known a woman—any woman, ever—on page, stage, or screen, to throw up except when it is for the writer to let you, the audience, know that she is pregnant? You’d never guess, from watching movies, that most women don’t first begin to suspect that they are pregnant when they projectile vomit all over another person. Nor that women can vomit for any number of reasons, just as men can. For instance when they have food poisoning or when they read an example of one of the tropes below. If you’re writing that vomit scene, stop doing that. It’s the least original thing you’ll write all year.

I should probably go back and change the name of this one to “Tropes I’m Tired Of: Woman Edition” because all the tropes that came right to mind when I sat down to write have to do with—yep, that’s right. Women. Women and our nonbinary siblings who caucus with the women. Well, not just women but also queer people. Hey, you know what a lot of queer people are? Women.

I have seen all of these tropes one too many times and I’m hoping that by calling your attention to them, I’ll help you spot them before you commit all the way to including them in your story. Men write women like this, women write women like this—these tropes are an equal-opportunity trashfire. If you find yourself falling back on any of these, give your scene or character another think. Please? Do it for Catherine. 

Not Like the Other Girls

How many times has an author made sure to let you know, in no uncertain terms (because a character definitely says it out loud): She’s just not like the other girls. Maybe there’s a man telling her that she’s easier to talk to, understand, or relate to than other girls. Maybe she’s the one telling him that he should expect her to be different from all his past experiences with women, because she’s nothing like the other girls. Something about this particular woman is different and special. She’s just better than other women. 

The other girls? They only care about stupid girl stuff. This girl? She cares about beer, and video games, and sportsball. Other girls only eat salads and get jealous if another girl texts the hero. This girl eats cheeseburgers and has self-confidence. Other girls? Twilight Saga. This girl? Dresden Files.

Come here, let me tell you a secret: Every girl is not like the other girls. Every girl on the planet. Every girl on every planet. Literally all the girls. “Women” isn’t some annoying monolith that spits out an individual woman once or twice a generation who can interface with men in a meaningful way while the rest of us roll off the assembly line like so many Barbies: Unfun, inscrutable, programmed to care about cosmetics and prefer wine to beer.

Gillian Flynn did a great job explaining this in the famous cool girl monologue, but if you don’t like it or believe it because it was delivered via sociopath Amy Dunne, you can take it from me, a person who is slightly less sociopathic. It stems from the belief that a woman’s merit is inversely proportional to how similar she is to women generally. Women are bad and not cool. Therefore, to be cool and good, your woman character must be, demonstrably, as unlike them as possible.

If you want to use this terrible trope, make sure you’re keenly aware of what you’re doing, and why, so that you can use it insightfully. If you’re not using it ironically, you probably should not be using it at all.

Your One Queer Peer

So. You want to make sure your story represents the LGBTQ+ community and I applaud you. Queer people are everywhere and they belong in every story. But something I see a lot of the time (in writing of all kinds) is the carefully selected group of friends or associates, which includes one (1) queer person and one (1) person who belongs to a racial or ethnic minority. There may also be one (1) person of the “opposite” gender as the prevailing gender of the group—eg, a group of gals may have a token guy, or a group of guys may have a token gal.

I’m going to focus on queer inclusion but this goes for any kind of “other” in your story. Listen carefully.

Queer people have queer friends. We have nonqueer friends, too, but we have queer friends. Perhaps in ye olden days when everyone lived in a small town with one traffic light and if you wanted to use the phone you had to talk to Betty the Operator to get connected, queer people didn’t have a lot of queer friends. Maybe back then there truly was one queer person per small town and that’s it and even if there were more than one, how would you know?

Nowadays we have the internet, we have the face place and the my tweets and all that stuff. Queer people have queer friends. We travel in queer packs. If your circle of friends has just one queer person, then your queer friend almost certainly has a whole other circle of friends stashed someplace else that you’re not a part of. Not to compare myself to a cockroach, but, look—for every one queer person you see there’s ten more you don’t.

So if your story has one queer character, try to be mindful of the life that character has outside their circle of straight friends. And just for your information, in the event your story has two queer characters—queer people can have all kinds of relationships with each other, not just romantic relationships. Just like a straight man and a straight woman can be just friends, two queer women can be just friends. Please don’t bash your two queer characters together like Barbies to make them kiss just because they have no other options.

I have thought more about Barbies in the course of writing this article than I have in my entire life heretofore. Anyway, speaking of Barbie.

Dumb Blonde

This is the Dolly Parton rule, and it ties in to Not Like the Other Girls, above. Here’s how it goes: A beautiful woman, in the course of the plot, handily demonstrates her intelligence and everyone is shocked by the development. Or, a beautiful woman expresses that she is tired of everyone assuming that she is unintelligent; she is worn down by working so hard all the time to demonstrate that she has brains to go with her beauty.

I’m sure it will not shock any Shelf Life readers to hear that women can be beautiful and intelligent at the same time. Women aren’t born with a limited number of attribute points that must be split between the two. That’s not even the trope that I’m addressing here.

Studies have shown that when people—people of any gender—see a beautiful woman, they are more likely to believe that she is intelligent than not. Thanks to the halo effect, people (of all genders) perceive other people (of all genders) to have additional positive qualities if they are attractive. We perceive attractive people as smarter, kinder, funnier, and having better social skills than people who are less attractive.

Do any of those things actually correlate with any of those other things? There’s a lot of science on that but I don’t care about it for the purpose of this article. The crucial thing is that if your character (man, woman, doesn’t matter) is beautiful, then they probably have not been facing a whole lifetime of clawing their way uphill trying to get people to look past their beautiful exterior and see that there is more to them—their kind nature, their sharp wit, their intelligence. Your character is probably not hearing for the umpteen-millionth time that someone just can’t believe such a beautiful woman also has brains. 

Beautiful people have an easier time of it in most aspects of life. Don’t default to this coward’s way of giving your character a chip on their shoulder. Spend some time thinking about the challenges your character may have faced without falling back on this ancient and incorrect chestnut.

Why do people use Dolly Parton as a perfect example of a beautiful “dumb blonde” when there’s fifty years of empirical evidence that she’s a creative mastermind, shrewd intellect, and cunning businesswoman? It’s not because she has large breasts and blonde hair. She deliberately cultivates a silly, flighty affect—her hairstyle and makeup are part of it, and the clothes she wears, but it’s also down to her manner of speech, the lilt and pitch of her voice, the self-deprecating jokes she makes, even her gestures and posture. How’s she able to put this over on people? By being smarter than they are.

I hope you enjoyed today’s scenic drive to the landfill with these painfully overused platitudes bouncing around the bed of the truck. Leave them behind and don’t look back. Trust me, you won’t miss them and neither will anyone else.

What are you doing Thursday? Reading Shelf Life, right? I’ll be back in two days’ time with an article on putting together a super solid list of comps for your book proposal or query letter. Even if you’re sure you’ve written the next Harry Potter, please don’t put Harry Potter down as your comp. Let’s at least talk about it first. You know where and when.

---

If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.

After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.