So as part of my effort to blog more often, I’ve decided to bring back the trope posts. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, perhaps you remember the Trope Tuesday series that I used to do. Those were mostly just a rehashing of each trope’s tvtropes page, with a bit of commentary at… Continue reading Playing with Tropes: Pragmatic Villainy
Tag: tropes and cliches
Trope Tuesday: Colony Ship
It’s been a while since I did the weekly Trope Tuesday posts, but those were a lot of fun and they still get a lot of traffic, so I’m going to bring them back with a couple of changes. Instead of focusing on the trope itself, essentially rewriting the description on the tvtropes page, I’m… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Colony Ship
Trope Tuesday: Made a Slave
Just because something is heinous doesn’t mean that it won’t make a good story. In fact, the Rule of Drama practically guarantees that it will make a good story. For some weird reason, we humans are fascinated by things in fiction that would horrify us in real life, and love it when our favorite characters… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Made a Slave
Trope Tuesday: Foolish sibling, responsible sibling
Whenever you’ve got two characters who interact with each other a lot, chances are that one is a foil of the other. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big reason is that it helps to highlight certain character traits by providing contrast. Because the contrast is the important thing, the relationship… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Foolish sibling, responsible sibling
Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone
For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart some of the tropes I’m playing with in my latest WIP, Sons of the Starfarers. One of the things I love to do when brainstorming a new story is to use tvtropes like a menu, finding the tropes that best fit my story… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone
Trope Tuesday: The Beach Episode
I’m at Cape Cod this week, at a condo that doesn’t have internet, so it’s going to be a quick and dirty Trope Tuesday post this week (no, not like that) because I’d rather be on the beach than at the Dennisport Public Library. Speaking of beaches … One of the commonest beach tropes, at… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: The Beach Episode
Trope Tuesday: Curiosity is a Crapshoot
Is curiosity a bad thing? Well, it depends how genre savvy you are. It seemed to work out pretty well for Alice, but not quite so well for Pandora (or the rest of the ancient Greek world, for that matter). Curious monkeys seem to come out all right, and their constantly curious counterparts also seem… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Curiosity is a Crapshoot
Trope Tuesday: Smart People Play Chess
Want a fast and easy way to show that your characters are smart? Not bookish, necessarily, or nerdy, or even the designated smart guy in the five-man band, but intellectually adept no matter what else their role in the story? Well, you could indicate that through inordinate loquaciousness, but too much of that tends to… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Smart People Play Chess
Trope Tuesday: Knight Templar
For this one, I’m going to pull the description straight from tvtropes itself, since the whole page is pretty good: Sometimes, the Forces of Light and Goodness get too hardcore. In a deadly combination of Well-Intentioned Extremist, The Fundamentalist and, generally speaking, not so different, they get blinded by themselves and their ideals, and this… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Knight Templar
Trope Tuesday: Gone Horribly Wrong
For this week’s Trope Tuesday post, I’ve invited a guest blogger to come on and discuss one of the tropes in his most recent book. Andrew Saxsma is the author of Lonely Moon, a space opera / horror novel. I haven’t read it yet so I can’t say much about it, but it looks interesting,… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Gone Horribly Wrong