Today would have been my mom’s 91st birthday. In her honor, I am setting this so that anyone can read it.
Also, you can see the video version of this article here.
The Sliding Puzzle Map of Modern Tropes.
During a trip my son and I took to Alaska, we visited a museum that had a gigantic map of Anchorage. This map was like a dinner-table-sized version of one of those old-fashioned puzzles that used to come in Crackerjacks or with bubble gum, where you would slide square pieces around to form a picture.
Each block of this giant map in the Anchorage museum was a section of landscape: mountains, trees, roads, rivers, large bodies of water, etc. You could tell if the blocks had been arranged correctly by whether or not the pieces of landscape matched the blocks next to it. If a mountain fell off like a sheer wooden cliff, because the other half was missing, or if a winding river ended abruptly in blank green wood, you knew the blocks were in the wrong place.
Some errors were obvious. A moment’s glance showed that half a mountain did not connect to the blue square representing the middle of the ocean. Some errors, however, were more subtle. You had to study the map closely to notice that one road piece had a different width from another, or that this section of green had a touch of blue at the corner that needed to be matched with a body of water.
Now you may be wondering what this has to do with, well, anything. Bear with me just a little longer.
The Landscape of the Human Heart
We think of stories as random collections of imaginary things that we can do anything with, but they are not. Stories have a logic to them that they must follow if they wish to entertain.
Stories horrify or delight—or whatever they set out to do—based on how well they recreate in our mind’s eye the landscape of the human heart (or the soul or the psyche. Your pick.)
A writer’s job is that of an adventurer. We gather our courage and set off to explore this landscape, seeking out portions of it yet unseen and returning to share our wondrous finds with our fellow human beings. We need to record what we find there faithfully. Otherwise, those who read our reports will know—in the same way that a person standing at the giant map and looking at the blocks can tell when they are out of place—that we have not done our work faithfully.
Now, what does this have to do with tropes?
A Turn of Tropes
Trope is derived from the Greek word tropos, which means turn. Turn developed into the idea of style or manner, as in “a turn of phrase.” Today, it has come to mean “a figure of speech or a recurring theme,” but once originally had a more specific meaning.
Ruth Johnston, author of All Things Medieval, notes: “During the time that church liturgy was in transition, churches began to expand the pure Bible material by inserting little expansion moments. The extra words or song was noted in the liturgy, and it's this they called the “trope.”
The first trope was in the Easter liturgy, when the angel at the empty tomb asks, ‘Quem Quaeritis?’ or ‘Whom do you seek?’
“This was implied in the story, but no one gospel text had the full exchange,
‘Whom do you seek?’
‘Jesus of Nazareth.’
‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen. Go and tell the others.’
As the tenth and eleventh centuries progressed, more tropes were added, putting some narrative color into the Bible stories.”
From this early history, tropes developed the more general meaning of a recurring theme. In particular, it came to be a critic’s tool, something used by those comparing one story to another.
The Logic of Gravity
Imagine a river rushing down the high slopes of a mountain. Someone has plopped a huge boulder into the river’s path. Where can the water go?
Well, it could go left of the boulder. It could go to the right. It could work its way under the boulder. It could fill up a little pool until it could flow over the boulder. A ramp could be built so that the water flowed above the boulder and cascaded back to its riverbed in a waterfall.
All these things fall within the possibilities of what nature allows.
But the water cannot suddenly shoot upward or teleport to below the boulder or in other ways violate the laws of gravity.
If you were looking at this landscape, it would look correct to your eye. The peak of the mountain was up. The sides sloped down. The water ran the way your experience with life told you that water should run.
If this landscape were a story, each way the water runs is a trope.
In some stories, when the water of the hero comes to the boulder of the obstacle, it goes left, others, it goes right. In a mystery, the water might flow into an unexpected underground tunnel. In a romance, it might fill the pool formed behind the boulder slowly to flow over, forming a lovely picture.
In a spy thriller, the hero pushes a button and rides over the spout that suddenly shoots out of the hillside to redirect the water safely over the boulder. This kind of twist can be tricky to pull off, but if your hero is known by the reader to be the clever, gismo-using type, you make it seem believable.
But in each case, the flow of water, the plot and action of our story, has not violated the laws of nature or, in our case, the logic of the landscape of the human heart.
Tropes Gone Wrong
To return to our map analogy, imagine I took my waterfall block and stuck it randomly in the middle of the blue ocean block.
You would know instantly that something was off. This is not lifelike.
Because pieces of mountains, trees, waterfalls, and lakes cannot be placed randomly like Legos that you stick together in whatever order they happen to fall.
And yet, ladies and gentlemen, the modern use of tropes is exactly like that.
The Horror That Is TV Tropes
I remember the day I first saw TV Tropes. Instantly my heart fell, because I was envisioning exactly what has come about today. Let me explain.
First, a disclaimer. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with TV Tropes from a researcher’s point of view. As a source of places that you can find certain ideas in stories, it is a fantastic resource.
It is only when authors begin taking it too seriously that it becomes a problem. But, sadly, it has become a problem—or rather, this kind of thinking has become a problem.
A trope, as mentioned above, is a critic’s tool. It is a way of looking at stories from the outside—as if the mountains and waterfalls and dells and parking lots of our landscape were independent Legos, and could all be examined individually.
Specifically, it takes events that are natural elements of the landscape of the human psyche and treats them as if they are individual, unrelated elements.
It is not a writer’s tool. In fact, from the writer’s point of view, there is no such thing as a trope—and herein we find our problem.
As I mentioned, the moment I saw that someone was codifying the turns of stories and labeling them, I knew what the response would be. Authors, who are not the most confident of folk, would become self-conscious.
They would begin to hesitate to report faithfully upon the findings of their explorations of the landscape of the soul for fear of describing something that would superficially sound too much like someone else’s report.
I just never imagined that one of the first to fall would be Disney.
I love the older Disney cartoons, the ones based on fairytales. Their storytelling is fantastic.
In the more recent Disney movies, however, the scriptwriters have been so self-conscious of the tropes that people have poked fun at on the internet that they have begun ruining their stories. They “reverse” tropes for no reason, not by coming up with a clever new way for the water to get by the boulder, but by having it fly upward for no reason at right angles to—well, everything—so as to hit the viewer in the eye.
And when they don’t do this, they add cringeworthy dialogue to try and explain away tropes—pulling the viewer from the story and entirely sapping the power of the turn of the story they are mistakenly calling a trope.
All of which have make their films much less enjoyable.
Disney is by far not the only one doing this, but they are the most prominent.
All this is the result of self-consciousness, of authors who are too embarrassed to report what they have discovered in their imaginary travels, because they have been cowed by those who believe that stories should be reduced to a pile of tropes and then judged on whether or not those tropes are new.
As if majestic mountains and babbling brooks and cascading waterfalls and foggy dells are all old hat, and only stories that invent new landscape features no one has ever seen before are worth anyone’s time.
As if the features of the imaginary landscape could be combined in arbitrary combinations, so that mountains stuck out sideways from waterfalls and oceans flopped around in mid-air, unsupported by bedrock or solid land.
People who talk about tropes in this manner betray themselves. The true explores of the imaginary kingdom—whether authors or readers—instantly recognize them for what they are: posers who have never traveled through the landscape of the soul.
These people are like those who get their information from travel logs, second hand, having never looked upon the wonders for themselves.
Trick and Consequence
All this brings us to the most important question: What exactly is a story?
What is this landscape that dwells within the human heart?
It is the consequences of The Trick.
In another lesson, we discuss The Trick—the primary principle of storytelling, how stories come alive through contrast, how a scene needs to end in a different place from where it starts.
The Trick is an explanation of what grabs our attention—ie, a feature of our mental landscape.
It is not something we pull out of our pocket when writing by the seat of our pants. Again, specifically, it is not arbitrary.
We don’t get to invent the features of the landscape. We don’t get to decide what human nature finds compelling.
We only get to arrange the elements in new and pleasing patterns, like a landscaper who has to work with rock and flowers and wood chips and grass, but who, nonetheless, can design a yard that looks like no other, if given the resources.
You Must Go Down To Go Up
The Trick says that if you want a happy end to your scene, you have to start off sad. If you want to go up, you have to go down first. This is because something that is down has further to go to get up, so it gives the impression of greater achievement.
So the landscapes that stories explore follow the Trick, because that is how those landscapes are formed, the same way that real landscapes are constrained by elements such as gravity.
If a boy is going to go on adventure, it is more startling if he is a small, poor boy with little worldly support than if he is a well-to-do boy with all that the world can offer.
If he is going to fight a monster, it is more dramatic if it is a gigantic dragon who is going to eat his village if he fails than if it is an overweight hog who could probably be chased away by yelling and waving one’s arms.
If he is going to rescue a girl, it is more compelling if she is a princess and the future of the kingdom is at stake than if she is the baker’s assistant whom no one will really miss.
These things are not true because of custom or the Patriarchy or culture. They are not true because someone placed the right tropes in the right order.
They are true because they are true.
They are true because in the landscape of the human heart is a place, in the sense that its rules are not arbitrary. A princess, who represents the love and fears of a nation, is objectively more dramatic than a random person who has no particular ties.
Not because of classism or feminism or any ism, but because a person who has more effect on the world around them has more potential for drama—more ability to go up or down, to end happily or sadly—than someone who has less effect on the world within the story.
The Wonder of the Wood Perilous
If you want to understand the principles of storytelling—the basic features of the landscape of the human heart, you could not do better than to read fairytales.
Some might say that fairytales are pure trope, but it would be more accurate to say: Fairytales are pure Trick. A tailor’s son must face a giant. A poor youngest son must make a sad princess smile or die. A goose girl must win the heart of a prince.
The lowest are exalted. The mighty fall.
Good stories do not follow the “tropes” of fairytales because they are unimaginative, uncreative. They follow these same patterns because that is what the landscape of the heart looks like.
Tired Tropes
That is not to say that tired tropes do not exist.
There was a reason that I used water running through a channel for my analogy. Stories are like water cutting a channel through the countryside. At first, they are fresh, sprightly streams, and they burble over the rocks. But with time, they develop into quiet meandering rivers that wander obviously across the plains.
When this happens, an opportunity arises for a twist, a creative and unexpected new direction for the water of our story to flow. At such times, turning a previous trope—a well-followed path—on its head sometimes works very well.
It is fresh and unexpected. Readers love it.
But it still has to follow the logic of the laws of the landscape, or the excitement will be like a lightning bolt. There one moment and then forgotten.
If the new twist follows the logic of stories, it will, in time become as common and familiar as what came before it. If it does not, it will fall away and be forgotten.
If the twist is dramatic purely because of shock value, it will only work once or twice. A waterfall in the middle of an ocean might be made to seem reasonable in one story, but it would be hard to pull it off again and again.
As soon as the shock is over, the reversal fails to continue to entertain.
An Example
A good example of a reversal is Shrek. The princess is under a curse. We all expect a knight to save her and turn her human. Instead, she chooses her cursed state so as to find love with the ogre.
Unexpected, yet amusing.
And it followed logically from the set-up: Girl has ogre curse, ogre is love interest.
However, since Skrek, other stories have tried to follow this same pattern. They do not gain anything from freshness, because it has been done before. And “girl chooses not to be human rather than to be cured” is like the waterfall in the middle of the ocean. It has to be handled expertly, or it begins to lead to unpleasant places, to go against the flow of the rivers that run through the landscape of the heart.
Dangerous Territory
One of the dangers of ‘reversing expectations’ or going against a trope just to go against it is that the story may fall into wish-fulfillment territory.
An orphan who has a hard life persevering and making good has proper application of the Trick both emotionally and practically. The reader believes that the prize was fairly bought through the character’s struggle and suffering.
But if a character makes good without any price—that is wish-fulfillment and, frankly, not very interesting to read. When the character is a girl, she is often called a MarySue.
(This comes from a Star Trek parody, in which the author, in order to mock the wish-fulfillment aspect of many pieces of fan fiction, had her character Crewman MarySue good at everything and adored by all the other characters on the Enterprise.)
Wish-fulfillment stories are often boring or worse, because the lack of struggle makes the character’s success unbelievable instead of satisfying.
Atlas to the Imaginary Country
Which leads us to the most important question of all: Where is this landscape of the heart and how do we get there?
How do we learn to see it, to develop the courage to explore its unexplored wilds, the eye to see its mountains and valleys, the skill to come back from these far places and report truly upon what we have seen?
How do we learn to develop our stories from the inside? To allow them to follow the lay of the land, so that our readers feel in their hearts that what we are reporting is faithful and true?
How do we put aside concerns of originality and “whether this trope has been used before” and write the best story we can write?
Father In and Farther Up
The answer is both simple and difficult: By going there.
By daydreaming.
If you lay back and imagine your story, if you let your mind go and move beyond what you have already invented, you can reach a point where you begin to ask the question: how can I make this more…
Where the … is whatever quality your story represents.
Let us use a well-known example.
I want to write a story about someone who faces down a great evil.
Hmm…
Wouldn’t it be more dramatic if he were a boy rather than a man? A boy who has less freedom, less innate strength facing off against danger is more dramatic than someone with more ability.
How about if he were an orphan? Isn’t that even more dramatic? An orphan boy who doesn’t even have parents facing off against this terrible evil?
But what if he wasn’t just an orphan, he’s an orphan being raised by people who don’t like him. They dislike him so much, they make him sleep in a cupboard under the stairs.
Not only is he parentless and disliked, living under the stairs, but he’s famous. And because he’s famous, other kids automatically dislike him, because they are jealous, and it never occurs to them that his life might be so awful.
And what if…
You get the picture. Hopefully, you see how making Harry Potter’s lows even lower led to allowing his heights to be even higher.
Now, it’s your turn…
Exercise A: Exploring the Landscape of the Heart
The best way to learn about the imaginary country is to explore it. How do we do that? By going there. Specifically, by daydreaming about pushing the limits of the story’s current situations.
Take an aspect of your story: a dramatic scene, the background of your character, an aspect of your plot.
Daydream. What could you do differently? What could you do to make the heights higher and the depths lower? To make the whole thing more iconic? More compelling? Sadder? Happier?
How can you provide more torque on your characters to put them under greater pressure and make their experience more epic?
Without any concern for what you are actually willing to use in your story, make a list of things that could increase the drama, sadness, happiness—whatever quality you wish to increase.
1) Make a list of things that follow logically from your premise that might do this.
2) Make a second list of things that do not follow—things that wouldn’t work for your story. Notice how the story feels flatter, more like fan fiction, if you indulge in these more unrealistic directions.
Take at least one item from each list and explain why it works or does not work.
Example:
1) You decide to twist the knife, making the life of your character, Harry Potter, more painful. He discovers he isn’t actually without family after all. He has a godfather—who is thought by everyone in the world to be a horrendous criminal, so he can’t live with him or really benefit from his existence.
This makes his life harder because now he has the promise of a real life with someone who loves him, but unfair misunderstandings are standing in his way—making his loneliness even more poignant.
2) Your character, Harry Potter, is a chick magnet with a girl on either arm All the girls adore him. Also, whenever a professor is uppity to him, he gets petty revenge on the teacher, showing the person up in front of everyone for a good laugh.
Both of these things decrease Harry’s alienation and misery, making his life easier and the drama of his situation less.
Being a chick magnet would make his character both less lonely and more shallow. Getting revenge on the professors who mistreat or belittle him would, again, decrease his alienation and misery, reducing the drama of his situation.
Exercise B: Rescuing Reversed Expectations
Take your character from Exercise A2, or invent another character for this exercise. Give the character a handful of qualities that do not immediately draw sympathy: rich, successful, snide, uncaring, petty, etc.
How would you make this character appealing to a reader? How would you make the story not just wish-fulfillment? What would you have to change about the story premise? What kind of problems would you have to add to help the reader engage with such a character?
Examples:
1) A character with a big family is not as sympathetic right off the bat as an orphan, but maybe they are the odd person out in their family? Or maybe their family is big and loving, but this causes its own problems as the character is always being sucked into the dramas of the other family members.
2) A snide, uncaring character can be great fun, Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever or Harry Flashman from The Flashman Papers come to mind, but they often do not succeed. They are clever and tricky and come out on top in many ways, but often fail at whatever it was they were actually hoping to achieve.
Pick some unappealing qualities of your own and give it a shot!
Bonus:
If in the previous exercise, you come up with an idea that is better than one you are using now, write a scene where you use or introduce a new idea.
(Example. If you had decided your character Harold Potter was going to be an orphan, and now you suddenly decide that you are going to call him Harry and make his life so much more miserable by banishing him to live in a cupboard, write the scene where you introduce that notion. Etc.)