A Conversation With Cindy Dees on Tropes and How to Use Them (Killer Writers)

“Cindy, you’re a bestselling novelist in several genres. You have written over 100 novels and are now writing and exploring tropes in various genres. What is a trope?”

“A trope is a familiar story structure that we all recognize. It’s like a classic recipe for a story, with a beginning, a middle, a black moment, and an ending that’s the same in every story of that type. For instance, if I mention a ‘Romeo and Juliet story,’ most people would know exactly what that story would be like. The trope is just the structure of that classic story that we all know, and it’s not any more complicated than that.”

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“Why do we need those structures?”

“They are the skeleton of every story that we tell. A story isn’t a story unless it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I suppose Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot might disagree with that. But I also don’t see the public running out and enjoying reading Waiting for Godot often, either. I like to think the trope is the Christmas tree, and what each author does is the decorations they put on it.”

Cindy Dees

“You have written the book on tropes.”

“Yes, so I have started writing a series of books that are for working writers to help them when they get stuck with a story, or to understand a particular story that they’re thinking about telling, or to find a structure for a story they’d like to tell, the right trope for a character they might have in mind, or if they have a trope in mind to find a character for it. And so, I, as a working writer, sat down and asked myself, ‘What are all the things I would need to know about a particular trope to be able to write it?’ I started with a set of universal romance tropes, meaning they are the story structures of two or more people falling in love that apply to romance novels and any fiction genre. So, I’ve had writers contact me who are writing noir mysteries, for example, but there will be a romantic relationship in their story, and they didn’t know how to handle it. They picked up one of my books and then found a structure for building that relationship that was helpful to them. Or, I’ve had sci-fi and fantasy writers contact me and thank me for writing it because they were able to lift romantic relationship information out of the tropes of how people meet, have problems, have a crisis, and solve it and end up happily in love. So, it’s not just for romance novels. When I first started writing that volume, I had identified about 140 tropes that apply to all fiction genres. I started writing them, expecting to do a couple of pages per trope, and wouldn’t that make a nice three- or four-hundred-page book? Twelve to fourteen pages into each trope, I realized I was in trouble because it would be a 1,600-page book, so I’ve broken it into four volumes, and the third volume is out now. I’m working on the fourth volume. I hope to have it out this summer. The next two books I want to write are the tropes of cozy mysteries and the tropes of thrillers. I’m afraid the thriller trope book will do the same thing and explode into a few volumes. It may be things like psychological thrillers, espionage, and military thrillers. My list of tropes for thrillers keeps expanding, and I’m up to close to forty tropes right now, so that may end up being a couple of volumes when I get to it. I already have several volumes of tropes planned in mystery, and cozies are wildly popular and seem like an appropriate first set of mysteries to do. There are crime mysteries, noir mysteries, and classic whodunits. I will have to play with them and see how many books there are. This small project has blown up in my face.”

Romance Tropes series by Cindy Dees

“For writers who are more free-spirited, they’re going to ask you, ‘Is this stuff mandatory?’”

“A trope is. I dare you to write a story without a beginning, a middle, and an end. And while there’s no magic formula to the names that I’m giving the tropes that I’m putting in the book, and there are as many variations on any story type as there are human beings, you are going to put a trope in your book. You will create a beginning, a middle, and an end in your story. Where we get confused as writers is the word ‘trope.’ If you open a dictionary, you’ll see two definitions. The first definition is that it is a story element that is clichéd. That’s how many authors think of tropes.”

“That’s how I think of tropes.”

“You think of a cowboy, a highlander, or two characters being snarky with each other before they fall in love, or a Sam-Spade-clichéd character that’s been way overdone.”

“Yep.”

“The second definition in the dictionary is the definition that I’m using, which is this business of it being the classic archetypal structure of the story. And so, I often hear writers say, ‘I’m not writing with tropes,’ or I’ll hear publishers and editors say, ‘I just want a book without so many tropes,’ and what they’re talking about in that framework is they don’t want a clichéd story. They don’t want a boring version of these archetypal story types.”

“So, if I say I’m writing a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story, with a beginning, middle, dark moment, and an end, then it’s simply shorthand for how I will pitch this book, too.”

“Once your book is written, you need to market and package it, and it is critical to signal which tropes your book is about because some readers will love that trope and make it an auto-buy. Others will hate it.”

“You used the word in plural. Is it okay to mix and match tropes?

“Absolutely. There’s one warning I will give, and that is: If you suggest a trope at the beginning of your book, meaning you introduce a story element or you introduce a premise-type element into your story that makes a reader think you’re going to tell a trope in your book. If you don’t, they’re going to be mad. Let me give you an example. I just read a book not too long ago. It was in manuscript form that somebody else had written. It was about a confidential informant for the police. In passing, in the first chapter and about the third scene, he witnessed a transaction where a biological weapon was being sold by a bad guy to an unknown buyer. And then we move on to a different scene. I spent the entire book waiting for that chemical weapon to show up again and to be something that the police were told about, and they were trying to track down, and either maybe somebody tried to use it, or the good guys stopped the bad guys from using it at the last moment, and then, the world was saved. And it never happened. It was never brought up again. I was frustrated that that element of promise had been made of a certain type of story arc. So that’s my big warning: If you introduce a trope, the readers will expect the middle, the black moment, and the ending that goes with that trope. That said, it is possible and ideal to layer multiple tropes within the same story. And so, again, it’s the beginning of something that then has a middle, it then has a crisis, and it then has an ending.”

“If you start combining, how do you handle the developmental build of all these sub-story arcs? You’ll have a 3,000-word story before you’re finished.”

“Let’s say I end up with fifteen to twenty tropes. This gives me maybe sixty or seventy scenes of what I must do in the story. And many of those scenes will require a few scenes to set up. Then I’m sitting here going. ‘Oh, my gosh! I can’t write a book with two hundred scenes. It would be 800 or 1,000 pages long,’ so I must start combining those scenes and asking myself which elements from the various tropes I can do in the same scene. Can an argument between two characters cover two or three plot points? Can they wander from one plot to the next or one plot point to the next? And I call those layering scenes. You then must layer elements in each scene. But what that gives you is that every scene you write is a powerhouse scene with multiple important plot points, multiple developments, and multiple pieces of information revealed to tell these various elements of your story. You end up with very dense, I call them, two-way plots. Every page and every scene has stuff in it that’s of interest and new to your reader, and it moves your story forward. I like layering my tropes as a means of plotting tightly.”

“Can you turn a trope on its ear?”

“Yes! In most books, you think of a happy-ever-after ending or a satisfying resolution. The good guys win, the bad guy is caught. If you want to turn that on its head and get yourself a tragedy, the entire story proceeds exactly as a happily-ever-after story until the climax, and then, instead of going well, it goes badly. That’s the only difference between a happy ending and a tragic ending. But the rest of the story is going to go the same way. We will build up our readers’ hopes through the story, and it will all fall apart at the last moment.”

“So, it’s not formula at all.”

“No. It’s a Christmas tree, and you have a box of ornaments.”

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NYT and USA Today bestselling author Cindy Dees is the author of 100+ novels. A former U. S. Air Force pilot and part-time spy, she writes thrillers, military romance, and bestselling nonfiction, writing how-to series using tropes. www.cindydees.com