Your personal tropes

Status
Not open for further replies.

KalenO

practical experience, FTW
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
331
Reaction score
75
Location
Los Angeles
Website
www.houseofegoandmadness.blogspot.com
So today I was looking back at a couple of the manuscripts I've written and realized that though I wrote them years apart, they both came from the same place thematically (MC dealing with death of a loved one as a primary emotional conflict) - though they're very different in direction, style and even genre. But it got me thinking. I think all of us, published and unpublished, have those themes we tend to come back to time after time in our writing, whether due to them just being of particular interest to us, or speaking to us on a personal level or stemming from something in our past...

So my question to everyone is, how often do you run across the same themes in your own work? Do you ever worry or feel derivative of your own work or redundant....even if you're not repeating characters or plot points, but just themes?
 

Christyp

Lizard Lady
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 10, 2010
Messages
537
Reaction score
42
Location
STL, Baby. Go CARDS!!!
I tend to have piece of sh*t husbands, whether turning them into ghouls, demons, or just plain losers. Either way, I always punish them!
 

Wicked

Outcast Rogue
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 19, 2009
Messages
6,728
Reaction score
3,546
Location
Lost
I tend to lean toward my favorite themes, but my eldest was the one who pointed out to me that my favorite trope characters were so similar they could be transplanted from one story to another with just a name change.

The Deadpan Snarker, and The Snark Knight seem to be my greatest weakness. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSnarkKnight

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilentSnarker
I actually depend on the Silent Snarker trope for my cartoon series.
smiteyou.jpg

seashells.jpg
 

Kitty27

So Goth That I Was Born Black
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 13, 2009
Messages
4,092
Reaction score
951
Location
In The Darkside's Light
Mine is a variation on The Fashion Villain Victim.

I cannot write characters that dress in heinous fashion. Nope,can't do it. Everybody dresses well. My son had to gently remind me that characters living in impoverished circumstances can't wear Gucci and the like.

The hell you say,young man! They can dress decently on a meager budget.
 

Alison_Kale

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 21, 2012
Messages
64
Reaction score
9
Location
Brooklyn. Almost.
Mother-daughter relationships, sibling relationships, opposites-attract romantic relationships. Everyone also tends to be a little too smart for their own good.

I think family themes show up so often because they never go away in our own lives. I've also heard that the first book anyone writes is always about their childhood. It's sort of a horrifying idea.
 

amlptj

Speling & grammer murderer, Sorrie!
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
10,424
Reaction score
689
Location
Philadelphia PA
I always way add in some poor bullied kid as one of my MC's. Bullying seems to always end up being a subplot of all my books.
 

A.P.M.

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 20, 2010
Messages
924
Reaction score
182
A trope in a lot of my work (not 100% of it, but most of it) is the character who is weaker or different in some way than everyone else. He'll be the mage who can barely use magic, or the fairy who can't fly.
 

benbradley

It's a doggy dog world
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 5, 2006
Messages
20,322
Reaction score
3,513
Location
Transcending Canines
Smart MC always frustrated by being misunderstood by others. I learned it from Robert Heinlein's and Michael Crichton's novels and from the TV show Murphy Brown. The situation is not autobiographical, honest. Really. Why don't you believe me?

Also, that science and technology are Good Things, and that life gets better in spite of the efforts of so many people trying to make life better.
 

soapdish

writing
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 7, 2009
Messages
17,205
Reaction score
6,050
Location
At the portal to the Pacific
Ooh, I love this topic. I think we all have our *things* that we write about over and over...

For me it's:

Commodification of the body. In various ways.

Child abuse (because I write horror and that's the most horrific thing, imo)

Recycling. :Shrug:

Birth.

Often these things overlap in what I write.
 

muravyets

Old revolutionary
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 21, 2011
Messages
7,212
Reaction score
974
Location
Massachusetts, USA
Website
www.facebook.com
Ooh, fun topic. I always write sort-of anti-heroes. Villain-heroes. He's the only one you can trust in the Big Problem Situation, but he's the scariest bastard in the room when you start to get to know him a little better.

I'm still developing my ideas about female characters, but right now I'm writing kind of Ugly Duckling women. They're strong and capable, but feel out of their element, like outsiders/misfits, lonely, vulnerable, until they get into a scary place where they find their talents and personality fit in perfectly.

Finally, I like to write shaman's journey type stories, which are not really like hero's journey stories. A lot of people wandering out to the raggedy edges to find themselves.
 

Shuemais

We can't always be the Batman
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 17, 2011
Messages
1,603
Reaction score
441
Location
Western US
I rather like visiting other worlds, personally.

No, I'm not talking about an idea or concept, I mean picking up a character from this planet and depositing them on another one. The "Fish out of Water" scenario magnified to the Nth degree.

And I can't wait to do it again.
 

LadyA

Always lurking, never posting...
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 26, 2010
Messages
1,700
Reaction score
245
Location
The wilds of Devon, England
I write YA, and one of my personal tropes is broken, traumatised/emotionally damaged [usually male] characters. Probably because where I live, everyone's a bit old fashioned and it's frowned upon for a man/boy to show emotional weakness or anything like that. So i make up for the deficit ;)
 

KaiaSonderby

The Little Aspie That Could
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 25, 2008
Messages
229
Reaction score
33
Location
Sweden
Website
aerodaydreams.livejournal.com
Most (not all, but most) of my characters have some kind of tragedy or trauma in their pasts.

Most (but not all) have lousy relationships with one or both parents.

And my biracial characters have a tendency not to know parts of their cultural background, which I suppose might be a reflection of my own lack of knowledge on the same.

I think sometimes tropes develop because when something is part of one's life, it's hard to imagine it ever being any other way. (I work on it though. My latest MC knows a lot about her cultural background and has a good relationship with both parents.)
 

crunchyblanket

the Juggernaut of Imperfection
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Feb 18, 2011
Messages
4,870
Reaction score
766
Location
London's grey and pleasant land
Noooo, not TvTropes. That's my entire day swallowed up :D

I always have one character, usually male, who's a loveable rogue/gentleman thief type. A dishonourable man with a disarmingly affable personality.

My main characters are usually strong women who are reluctant heroes, forced to confront their own apathy. They often have a platonic life partner.

I have a strange fondness for throwing in love triangles, specifically ones in which all three participants are content to co-exist - a type 9 triang relation (usually m/m/f)
 

KimJo

Outside the box, with the werewolves
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Mar 17, 2005
Messages
4,028
Reaction score
356
Location
somewhere in Massachusetts
Website
karennacolcroft.com
I had to forcibly restrain myself from clicking the TV Tropes links...

I definitely have some recurring themes/tropes, both in my romance and in my YA.

- Characters who have been emotionally abused (in both romance and YA)
- Overcoming abuse (to the point that one of my editors asked me to stop writing romance heroines who've been abused)
- Mothers who are either incompetent or absent
- In my YA, bullying is a constant theme
- Also in my YA, I've developed a tendency to write male MC's with younger, often autistic, sisters, to the point that one of my editors told me to stop it.

Some of these things come from my own life; I was verbally and emotionally abused growing up and in my first marriage, and my mother and I haven't always gotten on well, to be vague. My older child is a girl, not a boy, but her younger sister is autistic and the dynamic between them is intriguing to me (I'm an only child). And I think everyone who's ever been a teenager has some experience with bullying.

There are other things that tend to recur in my writing (wiseass male narrators is the biggest), and since I'm aware of the things that I tend to reuse repeatedly, I make an effort to write stories without those elements. At least sometimes.
 

ViolettaVane

I'm living in a silent film
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Aug 5, 2011
Messages
309
Reaction score
54
Website
www.solaceames.com
Dead mom, bad dad.

I've written two so far, although they're very different from each other personality-wise. I'm trying to impose a moratorium on any further use of the combination.

(FYI: My mom is alive and my dad is kind of weird but not bad).
 

Sai

Book lover/Spy
Super Member
Registered
Joined
May 11, 2007
Messages
2,392
Reaction score
394
Location
Back home
Website
www.kuri-ousity.com
I often have main characters who become obsessed with something, whether it's another character or an item or an ideal.

Also, cheerful psychotics.
 

cmi0616

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Aug 14, 2010
Messages
1,802
Reaction score
141
Location
In the aeroplane over the sea
There always seems to be a drug addict in my work, or somebody very close to addiction. Not necessarily the main characters, but still, they find their way in there. I'm not sure why, I suppose they just tend to be dynamic characters.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.