Conventions, Tropes and Striking Out on Your Own

Yesterday I stumbled across a blog post by Savannah Gilbo on genre conventions vs genre tropes. As explained by Gilbo, a convention is a story element that fans of that genre expect to find in a story. Tropes are the way these conventions are enacted.

So let’s say we are talking about cozy mysteries. A convention is that the detective is never a professional detective. They are an amateur who somehow ends up solving the mystery. The tropes where the “detective” is concerned involve the type of character the writer creates as their point-of-view character.

Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time — that 99.9% of the time — the detective in the cozies that I read are women. They are unmarried although whether they are single, divorced, or widowed varies. If they have children, these children are adults or living with an ex or old enough to somehow not be in the picture.

I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately. Are these conventions? Or could I shake things up by creating a character that is married? Or the mother of young children? Granted, this could be difficult since young children can easily make solving a murder impossible. “Excuse me while I snoop through your life with my three rambunctious children in tow.”

Then I discovered Moving Is Murder by Sara Rosett. Rosett has written a cozy series (called either Mom Zone Mystery or Ellie Avery Mystery). Ellie Avery is a military wife and mom to a newborn. They’ve just moved cross country and that’s enough to keep her busy. But when a fellow military wife dies and then another is murdered, Ellie can’t let it go. Who is killing people and why in their quiet neighborhood?

Ellie is both a wife and the mother of a small child. So how does the get away with detecting? Her husband is an active parent! By giving Ellie different characteristics than many cozy detectives, Rosett shakes things up and creates a story that feels more unique than many books in the genre.

Now I’ve got something else to noodle over as I outline.

–SueBE

Halloween Books for Younger Readers

I love Halloween books. Love them.

And I don’t mean just books for younger readers. I love old school horror that relies on the creep factor vs gore. Stories that are atmospheric and keep you waiting for the thing that goes bump in the night are the best!

But I love Halloween books and creepy books for the youngest readers. Again, I think it is because it is creep minus the gore.

One of my son’s favorites when he was little was the Berenstain Bears Spooky Old Tree.  If you have never read it, it is an early reader picture book about whether or not the bears will dare to go inside this massive spooky tree.  Of course, they do it or it would be a really short and rather pointless book.

Another funny one is Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds and Peter Brown. Jasper Rabbit loves to eat carrots until they day they start following him. Or are they? Just the thought of a kid, even a vegetable loving kid, being haunted by vegies cracks me up.

Humor goes a long way toward making a creepy or scary idea work for younger readers. How could you do this? Let’s take a horror movie trope and see how we can switch it up.

Bryan and his family move into a new house. Their next door neighbor peeks at Bryan from behind the curtains. She yells at him when his ball lands in her garden full of dead plants. He’s convinced she’s a witch.

There’s the trope. Now we need a funny twist.

The kid he asks to help him investigate is actually a witch.

What other tropes could you play with? Here are a few possibilities.

• The evil doll that comes to life.
• The abandoned playground (vs the abandoned house/camp/castle).
• A cursed object. What if it was something ridiculous like a gum ball or bubble soap?
• Instead of a horrible smell announcing all that is evil, what if the character is worried because scary things happen when they smell sugar cookies? Or french fries?

What could you do with one of these? Or maybe you can think of another trope you could mess with like spider webs, the sound of footsteps, or a creaking door. Anything is fair game? You just need to fins a way to make it silly and creepy.

–SueBE

Tropes in Science Fiction

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I hope some of you attended the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Winter Conferece.  Normally held in NYC, this year it was a virtual event.  Something several speakers mentioned were tropes.  Not using your genre’s tropes is bad.  Using tropes without providing anything new?  Also bad. 

To fully understand this, it helps to know what tropes are. For those of you who may not know the term, a trope is a common story line or story element in a particular genre.  Spy/assassin movies?  Someone is going to be a double or triple agent.  Romance?  The couple end up together.  Science fiction?  

That noise you hear is a cricket.  I’m writing science fiction but I wasn’t 100% certain what the tropes are.  I decided to do a bit of research.

I found ten science fiction tropes:

1. Light speed travel.  Let’s face it.  Space is big.  It takes a long time to get from point x to point z.  Light speed travel is an accepted given.  You don’t have to explain it.  You can just use it.
2. Cryosleep.  Same things.
3. Computers.  Whether it is a hand-held device or the computer that runs the ship when everyone is asleep, computers are a science fiction given.
4. Robots.  Think of them as really useful, mobile computers.  
5. Aliens.  Life on other planets, especially a wide variety of life, can create conflict and also diverse, interesting characters.
6. Alien artifacts/technology.  It may be something aliens left on Earth, that people found drifting around, or even an entire ship.
7. Dystopian cultures/governments.  Many science fiction stories are critical of the here and now and dystopian stories are a natural extension of this as are . . . 
8. Post-apocalyptic events.  Things went to fiddle and may or may not be making a comeback.
9. Mutants/mutations.  These may be natural (as a result evolution) or helped along by radiation, chemicals, etc.
10. Body modifications. Here I’m talking about the surgical as in enhancements for human vision, computer uplinks, or artificial limbs.  

This means that at least one or two of these need to appear in my story.  (Hint: Look for 2, 3, 4 and 7.)  But I also have to make sure to bring in something new. A story that feels too similar to work that is already out there will bring a “no” no matter how much the editors like my writing. The solution? Reading, reading and more reading in my genre. Lucky for me I just read two Hilo graphic novels and have another waiting for me at the library.

–SueBE

Tropes: Using them to their best advantage

During a recent snowday, my family took our positions in the family room and watched Anna.  For those of you who don’t know the movie, she is a beautiful girl who is also a brilliant Russian assassin.  “How many times are they going to make the same movie?” asked my son. “We saw the same thing with Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow.”

The next day, I read Margo Dill’s blog post on tropes.  For those of you who may not know the term, a trope is a common story line or story element in a particular genre.  Spy/assassin movies?  Someone is going to be a double or triple agent.  Romance?  The couple end up together?

The problem is that when you don’t know the tropes, you don’t know what readers or viewers expect.  Romance?  They are going to end up together.  Adventure?  They are going to find the treasure or make the escape depending on the adventure.

I could only think of one cozy trope – the amateur detective will solve the mystery.  So I wondered what other mystery tropes I might need to know about.  Poking around I found several lists.  They included:

• The butler did it.
• The murder victim is a jerk so there is no shortage of suspects.
• There are no clues.
• The closed circle where everyone is stuck in a limited area.  Maybe they are snowed in, on a train or traveling through space.
• The victim is found in a locked room.
• The detective chats up the murderer who gives himself away by revealing a clue that has not been made public.
• Red herrings.
• The old dark house as a location.
• The suicide that is murder.
• The fake weapon that wasn’t fake.
• Dying onstage.

At this point, I’m only making use of the amateur detective and the jerky victim.  Oh, and red herrings.  I’m seriously not sure how you would do a mystery without red herrings.  But this list has definitely given me something to think about as I continue to write.

–SueBE