I feel a little funny saying this, especially since I was the executive editor of a literary journal for 23 years, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the word trope until a few years ago when it seemed like suddenly everyone was talking about it. These days, we see posts or vlogs about How To Write To a Trope, The Top Ten Tropes to Pull in Readers, or Write With Tropes or You Will Die!!

It wasn’t until I started paying attention to how writers were talking about tropes that I realized, oops, I’ve never done that. I’ve never adhered to expectations about a genre. I might start with a more genre-centered, trope-driven concept, but I always end up writing a story the way I want to write it. For example, when I  came up with the idea for Her Dear & Loving Husband, I intended to write a typical paranormal romance but I ended up with a literary novel about the Salem Witch Trials. When I came up with the idea for The Professor of Eventide, I was going to write a straightforward mystery but instead I ended up with something literary, Gothic, and very, very Poe. 

Don’t misunderstand me. I know that there are a lot of readers and writers who love knowing what’s coming next when they read trope-driven stories. They have their expectations and they like to see their expectations met. There’s nothing wrong with that. Tropes can act as comfort food because they’re reliable and they give readers exactly what they want. If you’re a writer, trope-driven books can sell well because there is an audience out there that devours specific kinds of books. 

My intention is never to be recalcitrant, but there is this inherent stubbornness in me that wants to write what I want to write the way I want to write it. I look at it this way: readers who love trope-driven stories are wonderful, but some of them are probably not my readers. I write what is commonly known as upmarket fiction, and, for the record, upmarket doesn’t mean it’s better. It just means that it straddles the border between literary and genre fiction. I wrote about upmarket fiction here.

For me, writing to a trope is similar to filling in a template, and I would absolutely hate that. In such cases, the character’s choices might start to feel like items I’m checking off on a to-do list instead of decisions that come organically from the truth of who the character is. I prefer characters that feel like multidimensional invisible human beings who make mistakes in situations that might not necessarily fit into a smooth narrative arc. For me, the challenge and the joy of writing fiction come from wrestling with these disparate pieces and fitting them into a cohesive whole.

Tropes have become marketing tags. While #EnemiesToLovers can be a great way to sell a book, for me as a writer, it would narrow the scope of what I wanted to create, and as a result, writing the story wouldn’t be interesting to me. I loved filling out Mad Libs sheets when I was a kid, but it’s not something I’m interested in when I’m writing a story. 

Is my upmarket fiction harder to market than something that has a clear trope or genre expectation? Sure. But it’s a trade-off I’d make any day. I’d rather write the story I have in my heart. When I think back to writing my novels, once I start digging in, the story opens up in new and interesting ways that catch my curiosity. And I always feel like, well, if I’m interested in something, then there will be others who find it interesting too. 

I feel like I need to keep saying that there’s nothing wrong with reading or writing genre or trope-specific stories. We all have our particular reading and writing tastes, and so do I. I love the classics, and I love contemporary literature that is about something. Yes, I read to escape, but I also read to broaden my horizons and challenge my thinking. As a reader and writer, I love theme, and alliteration, and symbolism, and metaphor, you know, all the things you learned in English class. I love poetry. And all of it comes together to help me write my stories. 

Having said all that, I do think the idea that we can completely escape tropes is impossible. I too sometimes have Happily Ever After endings. Choosing to write without tropes isn’t about being difficult. It’s about following my curiosity wherever it leads me and allowing my crazy imagination full control as I bring my stories to life. It’s an invitation to dig deeper in order to find something that feels real to me, even if it isn’t perfect. With 100% honesty, I’d rather write a story that’s uniquely flawed than one that’s perfectly predictable. But that’s just me. The glory of writing fiction is that we get to decide for ourselves how to write.