Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29881
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29881
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The basic patterns of story are as old as the hills and they are not going away or losing any of their potency. It is always and forever in the execution.

But I think you need to stop thinking in terms of tropes, or at least stop reading TV Tropes. TV does not get by on storytelling. Most TV storylines are weak, and often absurdly so. TV gets by on your affection for the characters and that is largely down to the attractiveness of the actors playing them. The TV writer's job is to give actors and directors room to work. They can pull out the standard TV tropes again and again and let the actors go to town on them. 95 percent of the weight of the show is on the actor's shoulders (and that is reflected in their salaries). This is why recasting so often kills a show, while writers come and go and we rarely notice the difference.

In a novel, all the weight is on the writer's shoulders. You can't paper over the cracks with a pratfall or a pushup bra. Your characters are characters, not actors, and you need to focus on making them whole, human, and consistent, and on clearly delineating the desires that drive them.

This does not mean that you cannot use conventional plot devices. Story is what it is and there are only so many shapes it can assume. The key thing to understand is that you cannot use such devices to make readers care. Readers have to care about the characters **before** the familiar plot device occurs; they will not start to care just because such devices occur.

This is why the notion that you should start in the middle of an action sequence is so difficult to follow successfully (and why it is clearly contradicted by so many published books). You have to care about the character before you care about the action.

Get that part right, and all the tropes work. Get it wrong and all the tropes fail.

On the screen, that part is up to the actor. On the page, it is up to you.

Original score: 13