WriteHive Panel: How to Subvert Tropes
Image by Khusen Rustamov from Pixabay
One of the WriteHive online conference panels I watched was How to Subvert Tropes. This panel talked about what tropes are, when they become cliches, and how to then twist those tropes to make them fresh again.
The panel started out by talking about how tropes are the building blocks of stories that establish trust with readers within a given genre. However, they can become cliche when they get overused, feel shoehorned in, or make people uncomfortable and possibly become problematic or even offensive.
Part of the trick to avoiding the last of these issues is that authors need to know the history of the trope they want to use or subvert, so they can avoid the places that might become problematic or offensive. Even if you’re subverting a problematic trope, you have to watch out that the subversion is not also problematic.
When you pick a trope to subvert, there’s a lot of groundwork that goes into setting up the trope itself, but you also need to seed in the ways in which you plan to subvert the trope. So it’s sort of like using specific building blocks to create a structure that is familiar, but also slipping in some extra blocks that aren’t part of that structure, but that will pay off in the end.
If you’re curious to learn more about tropes, the best website for that is TV Tropes. If you want to learn more about subverting tropes, watch the full video from WriteHive! You can also find many, many more recorded panels on their YouTube channel from 2023 and earlier conferences!
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