I love reading and writing (what author doesn’t?), but over the years, I’ve read certain tropes that, in my opinion, brings a book down. What do I mean by that? Well, have you ever read a book where you love everything about it and then suddenly, the author adds in a cliched story point that makes you roll your eyes? This has definitely happened to me.
Now, I’m not saying authors that do this write horrible books. Every book takes time and effort to write and I applaud every author who sticks through this major commitment. No, I still love books with or without cliches. It’s just that I have my own likes and dislikes when it comes to cliches.
This list is my own personal opinion when it comes to certain tropes. These are the ones that range from “rolling my eyes” annoying to “this author just wasted my time, I want to slam the book shut” irritating.
Spoiler Alert for certain books.
5. The Neglectful Parents
I can understand making your main character an orphan. This gives them no familial attachments, forcing them to go ahead with their hero journeys. My problem is when the parents are still alive, but ignore the protagonist so much, it’s like they’re an orphan anyway. These are the parents that are so wrapped up in their own lives, that they forget they even have a child in the first place. Why did you two have a baby, if you weren’t going to raise them? I don’t want the parents to be completely obsessed with their offspring and act like helicopter parents, where they’ll wipe their kid’s nose if they sneeze, but I would like the parents to at least acknowledge their child.
The opening chapters of The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, represent this perfectly. Ten-year-old Mary Lennox lives in India with her English parents, but she’s actually raised by the Indian servants. Her father worked for the British government in India and was always too busy with his job. Her mother was beautiful, only wanted to go to parties, and didn’t even want Mary in the first place. Mary was spoiled rotten by the servants. They knew Mrs. Lennox might fire them if she even heard Mary.
I just can’t like parents like this. Yes, Mary becomes a better person after her parents die and she moves in with her uncle in England, but the neglectful parent trope is heartbreaking. I don’t like it when children think their parents don’t want them and that they’re a mistake. A child’s life is never a mistake.
4. Love Triangles
I’ve been watching a lot of Terrible Writing Advice on youtube lately. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a series of satirical videos where the creator, J.P. Beaubien, gives advice to writers. I just love his sarcastic tone when he’s giving his “terrible advice.” A running gag on the channel is Beaubien constantly telling his viewers to fix every writing problem with a love triangle.
Love triangles aren’t the worst trope ever, but it definitely isn’t my favorite. I actually tried to write one in Silver Rose, but gave it up quickly, because I found it too counterproductive to write. I already knew who I would pair Penelope off with, so why should I tease readers with the other option? The idea of a love triangle is to keep readers guessing. Oh, who will our female protagonist wind up with? Keep reading to find out.
The problem with a love triangle, however, is that either way, an author will anger readers. In the Hannah Swensen mystery series by Joanne Fluke, our main character Hannah finds herself dating two guys at once, who know about each other. Norman and Mike. Norman is the town dentist and at least a decade older than Hannah, but they have a lot in common, he’s funny, and Hannah describes him as safe and dependable, just like a favorite blanket. Mike is a detective and closer to Hannah’s age, but he can be a bit bossy when he’s telling Hannah to stay out of his investigations. Hannah describes Mike as a roller coaster. He’s dangerous and wild, but still a thrill.
My mom and I have both read some of the books in the series. We had a clear favorite between Norman or Mike. But, without giving anything away, Joanne Fluke eventually did marry Hannah off, and it wasn’t to the guy we wanted. We haven’t read any of the books since. This is the danger of love triangles. No matter what an author does, someone, somewhere, will be furious if you don’t “launch the right ship.” I’ve heard that shipping in books is a war. It certainly is.
3. The Misunderstanding
This is a favorite trope of all the Hallmark movies. In every single one of them, the main couple meets, falls in love, argue, and then fall in love again. And all in two hours. This isn’t just in Hallmark movies, though, the misunderstanding is littered throughout literature. The misunderstanding is usually something like this,
“I asked you to come to a party, but you said you were working. I saw you there with another girl.”
“I didn’t know you meant that party. No, I was there as part of my job. I was representing my department and you saw me talking to the mayor’s wife. We were discussing funding for my department.”
These are the conflicts in stories that can be solved with a simple conversation. This frustrates me to no end, because the misunderstanding is just padding for time, giving us an artificial problem that really doesn’t need to be there.
The day before I wrote this, my parents and I were watching “Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindelwald.” It’s only the second time we’ve ever watched it and I wanted to see just how bad it was two years later. Near the beginning of the movie, Queenie tells Newt that she read about his engagement to Leta Lestrange. Queenie’s sister Tina also read the article and immediately started dating someone else, who I doubt we’ll ever see on screen. Newt, appalled, quickly tells Queenie that he’s not marrying Leta. His brother Theseus is. Newt and Tina meet up in the middle of the movie, but Tina keeps cutting Newt off, not wanting to talk to him. Near the end, Newt finally gets a word in edgewise and tells Tina that Theseus and Leta are marrying. From the moment Newt and Tina appear on screen together to when the misunderstanding is resolved, I was internally yelling at them to just talk. That plot point added absolutely nothing to the story, except to waste my time.
2. Blaming the Hero for a Crime They Didn’t Commit
I know some people may not mind this one, especially since its in so many mysteries, but I hate it when a hero is accused of committing a crime. In mysteries, it’s usually the protagonist is a suspect in the murder and they solve the crime to prove their innocence. It’s a little different, though, when it happens in my favorite genre, fantasy.
Usually, in fantasy stories, this plot is saved for sequels. In the first book, we’ll meet the hero, they’ll save the day, and everyone will cheer. Nobody can deny that the protagonist is the goodest good guy who ever did good. In the sequel, however, all the characters turn on the hero, because there’s proof, flimsy unprovable proof, that shows they’ll doing bad. Whenever this happens, I classify the side characters as sheep, just going with the crowd.
In City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare, we meet our main characters, Clary and Jace. They save the day from a villain named Valentine and his evil organization named the Circle. Valentine and Jace are related, though, so that’s kind of a downer. Regardless, Jace still sides with good and helps Clary defeat him. All of the other characters are so grateful. “Thank you, Clary and Jace. We couldn’t have done it without you.”
In the sequel, City of Ashes, however, I think a couple of months have passed, and suddenly, nobody trusts Jace because of his connection with Valentine. They all seem to think that Jace, a proven hero, is about to turn to the dark side. Jace, a moody teenager, doesn’t do much to contradict this, except to pout. One character even treats Jace like a hardened criminal and throws him in a jail cell, just because Valentine got her son killed. Jace wasn’t even born when her son died, but clearly his being related to Valentine is enough proof that Jace was in on the plan. Jace’s own adoptive mom even turns on him and she’s known him for over ten years. All the teenagers treat Jace normally, but every single adult suddenly acts like Jace’s existence is a crime.
This trope just seems like another time waster, designed to make the reader question the hero, when we all know, they’ll be proven innocent by the end, anyway.
1. And Then The Hero Wakes Up and It was All a Dream
Everyone can agree that this is the worst crime a writer can commit. I don’t care if the rest of the story was fantastic, if the book ends with “it was all a dream,” I will be furious. This is the ultimate time waster. I want to be sucked into the story and feel like these characters are actually alive and I’m going through their problems with them, but if it ends in a dream, what was the point? The author just confirmed that absolutely nothing happened. My favorite characters were never real even within their own pages, so why should I care what happens to them? (The only exception to this rule is Alice in Wonderland, simply because the story is so strange that I have no idea if Alice was really in a fairyland or not.)
Luckily, I haven’t read many books that end as a dream, except for one. The Ugly Stepsister, by Aya Ling. The idea is an interesting one. A modern girl named Kat is asked to sort through a box of old children’s books in her attic. She finds an old, torn picture book of Cinderella. Kat’s mom calls her downstairs, Kat trips, and accidentally rips the book in two. A goblin spell on the book is activated and Kat is sucked into the story of Cinderella as one of the stepsisters, because she shares a slight physical resemblance to the character. A goblin tells Kat that they only way to leave the story and return to her mom and sister is to get the prince to “marry his true love.” Of course, Kat meets the prince and they fall in love, but Kat must try and force Cinderella and Prince Edward together, even though it pains her to see Edward marry anyone else but her. But, plot twist, since Kat and Edward are in love, Kat must marry Edward if she wants to leave.
Several problems here. Kat’s motivation for leaving Cinderella’s story is to return to the real world and to her mom and younger sister, Paige. Why should the reader care? Kat was only in the real world in Chapter 1 and was whisked away by Chapter 2. The only things we know about Paige are that she’s ten, made salsa, and likes Spongebob. As for Kat’s mom, um… she’s divorced? To be honest, we never saw Kat’s mom, we only heard her call to Kat while she was in the attic. Kat mentions during the course of the story that her father left them, so we don’t even learn this interacting with her family. Maybe if we had spent more time getting to know the mom and little sister, I would be rooting for Kat to go home, but it doesn’t seem worth it to me. The Cinderella characters are far more interesting and compelling people.
Another problem is the ending. Kat spends months in the story before she returns home and when she gets back, she has no memory of what happened. According to her family, she was knocked out for about a minute and Kat doesn’t question it. We know she was really in the book, because we see the goblins again, but why go to all this trouble to give Kat character development if she can’t remember it? She’s more confident, but doesn’t know why. What kind of ending is that?! So, yeah, Kat’s adventure really did happen, but since she can’t remember it, it counts as “she woke up and it was all a dream.” Aahh! So frustrating!
Tropes can be a wonderful thing. I love chosen ones, prophecies, and the hero’s journey, but you have to be careful with how you use them. All of my least favorite tropes could work, given the right author using them in just the right ways, but this can be tricky. Cassandra Clare may have blamed Jace for a crime he didn’t commit, but in a different book, Clockwork Angel, she wrote one of the most perfect love triangles I’ve ever seen, where I honestly didn’t know who Tessa would wind up with, Will or Jem. Aya Ling handled the misunderstanding far better than she ended the book. Kat was told never to discuss the book’s enchantment with the story’s characters. When she finally told Edward, he was surprised, but he did believe her.
My own advice on how to write tropes is to write whatever you want, what you think is right for the story. If you don’t like something, you can always edit it out later. And if you like a trope I mentioned here, don’t worry. Just because I dislike something, doesn’t mean that you have to think the same way. Write what you like and readers are sure to pick up on our passion. Books really are a beautiful way to bring people together.