trope
/trōp/
a figure of speech used in literature and culture to describe a common theme or device.
Something I have noticed during my time critiquing on the wiki and other writing adjacent spaces is authors fearing tropes, which I do not understand. It's not that the mere sight of tropes sends them running, more that authors don't want their works to be trope-filled or "tropey." This is mostly out of a fear of coming off as cliché, which, though I understand, is not the same thing.
Using tropes does not immediately make a work cliché.
Using tropes is a practice as old a storytelling itself.
For as long as human beings have been telling stories, tropes have existed. The creation myth, the flood myth, afterlife myth; these all share common tropes around the wide spectrum of human experience. Christopher Booker argues that all stories; that's right, all of them, follow seven archetypes:
- Overcoming the Monster (Theseus, Beowulf, Dracula)
- Rags to Riches (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre)
- The Quest (The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, The Divine Comedy)
- Voyage and Return (The Time Machine, The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind)
- Comedy (The Arbitration, Much Ado About Nothing, The Big Lebowski)
- Tragedy (The Portrait of Dorian Gray, The Great Gatsby, Oedipus Rex)
- Rebirth (Beauty and the Beast, A Christmas Carol, Peer Gynt)
Translators, feel free to replace the above with culturally appropriate stories that match the archetype. :)
I'm not saying Booker is 100% right, but if you widen your scope wide enough, all stories can fall into these seven archetypes.
Is this a bad thing?
Not inherently, no. Tropes aren't good, bad, neutral, or anything. They are just the building blocks with which we write fiction; written shorthand for characters, events, settings, etc. You name it, there's a trope for it. In fact, there's an entire website dedicated to it called tvtropes which used to only list tropes for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but has since expanded to cover just about any media you can imagine!
But back to what we were talking about; tropes aren't bad. Everything has tropes. Yes, even SCP. See:
- Thing that does a thing (AO-8522)
- Note at the end (SCP-4511)
- Murder Monster (SCP-4310)
- X-man anomaly (SCP-139)
These aren't inherently bad things! Though a lot of the time we see them used to deride newbie's articles, there are plenty of good articles that feature these tropes, as indicated by the links to recommendations above.
So don't fear tropes!
What you should fear though, is…
cli·ché
/klēˈSHā/
a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.
Cliché is when tropes go bad.
Remember when I said earlier that tropes aren't inherently good or bad? I still stand by that, however, there are some instances of tropes that you generally want to avoid using unless you are lampshading, parodying, subverting, or otherwise making a statement about said tropes. Let's take a look at an example, SCP-6101.
Please take a moment to read it, it is less than 300 words long.
…
Done? Good. Notice how it reads like one of many bad coldposts about a Mary Sue we experience, up until the twist about 3/4ths of the way through? A lot of new authors want to create a super-strong SCP that can beat up the Scarlet King, trounce an MTF, or whatever, which leads to a lot of posts about super cool and strong OCs that can do a bunch of things, but ultimately lack some semblance of a story.
This is because a lot of younger and newer authors come into the wiki having only known it through power scaling discussion, video games, or those TOP TEN STRONGEST/SCARIEST SCPs lists rather than as a collection of literary works. It is not their fault, and we shouldn't blame them for it, mind you, but rather the content "farmers"1 out there who see our site as a paycheck.
But anyway, back to SCP-6101. This article plays with the reader's expectations by purposefully establishing a cliché set-up and laundry list of overpowered OC abilities. It makes you think you're reading yet another cliché X-men type SCP before rug pulling you and hitting you with an emotional gut punch. This works because its unexpected and the first half of the article immediately makes you feel half-checked out because of how cliché it all is, again, only to be hit with the twist that makes you read it again.
SCP-6101 is a good example of cliché in action, but most examples of it aren't quite as fortunate. As previously mentioned in the Tropes section above, there are many tropes the likes of which we as readers on this site negatively associate with bad writing. As someone who has not only been here a long time, but also is currently head of the Deletions Team, I have read hundreds if not thousands of these articles. I know you have too, so I am not going to create a wall of shame on here either. There's a reason we deleted the Decommissioned articles, and I'm not about to start bullying people who don't have writing experience for trying something new.
And speaking of trying something new…
re·in·vent·ing the wheel
/ˌrēənˈventing T͟Hē weel/
a common idiom that means to waste time and effort duplicating something that already exists
New authors want their article to stand out among the over 9000 SCPs that currently exist on the wiki. This leads to a lot of people trying to reinvent the wheel in many unique, but ultimately not very good ways. I don't mean things like structure, ACS, Threat Level, or what have you,2 I mean story-wise.
Many will create meandering stories with random twists and turns that make no sense in an effort to not be seen as predictable.3 Many more will try to iterate on extant concepts such as SCP-049, SCP-073, SCP-076, etc. without knowing what about them made them iconic in the first place. Aside from, well, you know; being here early. Worse still, some will try making an 001 as their first work without realizing that an 001 is incredibly difficult to pull off! So what do we say to these industrious inventors ineffectually innovating?
Let's tackle these point by point.
Many will create meandering stories with random twists and turns that make no sense in an effort to not be seen as predictable.
Here's a secret: the fact is that a vast majority of readers are not thinking ahead as they read. This is because they are mostly focused on the present of your story. Another secret: sure, most will be able to recall context from earlier in which a scene makes more sense in, and most will also be able to recall your foreshadowing, but the key thing is that if your story doesn't use any of these things, the "twists" will feel underdeveloped and will come out of nowhere.
This may have been appealing in the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his sometimes bullshit Sherlock Holmes mystery reveals where it turned out the aforementioned detective knew of a clue the audience didn't, but nowadays, this can be seen as lazy and too convenient for the sake of the story.
Many more will try to iterate on extant concepts such as SCP-049, SCP-073, SCP-076, etc. without knowing what about them made them iconic in the first place.
This concept is a lot easier to wrap your mind around than the previous (not that the previous was hard to begin with) because the answer mostly comes down to two solutions: tribute, or coattail riding.
Tribute articles can work, hell, we've had two contests that are basically about that in a nutshell, but what a lot of tributes by people who lack literary experience miss is what worked about the tropes used in the original. Let's take a look at SCP-049, an anomaly that is often seen in many poorly thought out articles. A lot of the time, they set out to create a character that can match wits with the Plague Doctor, or assist him in his research of the Cure. What these types of articles miss is that the Plague Doctor only works when only he knows what the Pestilence is and when he is a lone man on a mission.
Coattail riding, on the other hand, is a lot more cynical and shortsighted. All this type of article does is try to cling to life by name-dropping other, more popular articles in an effort to try and catch fans of the original who are looking for more of the original article. No examples for this one, since I don't want to start a wall of shame.
Worse still, some will try making an 001 as their first work without realizing that an 001 is incredibly difficult to pull off!
Many new authors dream of having an 001, a goal very few actually attain. There is a lot of work that goes into these articles, some take years to develop, and many wait even longer until they have the skill necessary to create what is to be considered their magnum opus. What's crazier still is that some try to make their first article be an 001! Talk about courage.
A lot of the time, these first-time 001s blend the SCP format, prose, listpages, and tech assets in what appears to be an attempt to one-up those which came before them. The escalating arms race that is the 001 page is a topic for another day, but these first-timers appear to believe that the more flash they add to their article, the more likely it is to remain on the list. This is obviously not the case, as any good 001 requires above average writing skills.
Don't discourage these enthusiastic authors. We should be building each other up, not crabs-in-a-bucket-ing each other. Simply suggest that they take some time to build up their skills before trying again. If you are so inclined, critique the 001 itself, tell the author what works and what doesn't. If most of it isn't very well-polished, don't be surprised! It is a first-time work, after all! Very few people can claim to have posted kino for their first work on the wiki.
con·clu·sion
/kənˈklo͞oZHən/
a judgment or decision reached by reasoning.
Let's wrap this up. What do I want you to take away from this essay? Consider the following:
- Don't fear tropes! They exist for a reason.
- Tropes and archetypes are shorthand for writing characters, events, objects, etc.
- Tropes aren't inherently bad or good for the most part.
- Clichés are when tropes are overused/misused to the point of meaninglessness.
- Clichés can work when you use it to mess with expectations and subvert them.
- Trying to reinvent the wheel by trying to make a "unique" article can often backfire.
- Don't bite off more than you can chew for your first article.
These are of course just cliff notes, and I think there is a deeper conversation that could be had on the site about all of the aforementioned topics, definitely an even more intelligent one than I clumsily laid out here. If you only take one thing away from this drivel, I hope its "don't fear tropes."
And that's all I wrote.