What Are Tropes and Why Should You Include Them in Your Story?

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Campfire Technology, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, creates writing software to help storytellers write better stories faster. NaNoWriMo writers can try out Campfire’s Manuscript Module for free thisNovember! In this post, writer Amanda Jones shares some of the pros of story tropes:

With NaNoWriMo 2022 quickly approaching, writers everywhere are plotting, planning, and exploring ideas for the worlds they intend to visit come November. This, of course, likely includes drafting the elements of your story from literary tropes!

What are tropes, you ask? The definition has changed slightly over time, but we have come to know them as the commonly used building blocks of the stories we read and write. Not only are they just fun to play with in a setting of your own making, but they help us connect over shared experiences, regardless of the places we are from or the time we live in.

As a member of several online writing communities, I’ve often seen anti-trope discourse such as: “If a book contains X trope, I won’t read it,” or “X trope is so overdone, I can’t stand it.” And it worries me to think there is at least one writer out there who will stop writing their story after coming across something like this.

Because tropes exist for a reason. 

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