Hate and Love with Genre Tropes / Discovering Plot / 4:40

 

Hate and Love with Genre Tropes

Tropes are those genre category-specific details, characters, and events that readers relish and anticipate: a magic sword, the hard-nosed detective who drinks on the job, and the corpse found and lost in a cozy mystery. Some tropes—such as the Golden Child—transcend a single genre and can be found in all major genres.

Genre tropes can build a plot, but tropes are not plot. They are tools. Not every screwdriver in your tool box is used every time you need to screw in a screw. If you do use every tropes to build a plot, well, as a writer, you are S.C.R.E.W.E.D.

I won’t list genre tropes in this episode. Those are easy to find. I will explain the reason we writers are screwed when we depend on tropes for our plot and characters.

Yet we can use tropes ... just don't let them use you!

TIMINGS

• 00:00 Welcome
  
• 00:39 Opening Words
• 01:54 Genre Tropes
• 03:31 Folk Ballad Tropes
• 06:08 Commedia dell’ Arte Tropes
• 08:05 Epic Hero Tropes
• 12:13 Writing Fast with Stock Spinners / Story Wheels
• 15:24 Pulp Writers and Preventing Trope Repetition
• 17:48 Last Words
• 18:31 Closing

Total Run Time: 19:31

LINKS

Karen Woodward: “NaNoWriMo, Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason, and Plot Wheels” – https://blog.karenwoodward.org/2013/10/nanowrimo-erle-stanley-gardner-perry-mason-plot-wheels.html 

Lester Dent’s Plot Formula, as a pdf, is at multiple places on the Internet.

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Your Plot, from host M.A. Lee’s guidebook of the same name.

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Trailer https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk