Absolutely no worries on the delay! I feel your pain 🙂

Thank you so much for the additional guidance and I’ll definitely read your dope on tropes 😉

Hi Michael, apologies for the delay in getting back to you – I was travelling then teaching all weekend, been a busy time here!

When it comes to tropes, you don’t want to avoid them necessarily. It’s a common misconception that tropes are automatically bad, but they’re not. Tropes are just recurrent ideas you see in stories – for example, The Hero’s Journey is both a plotting archetype *and* a trope of the fantasy genre. So is good vs evil.

This means readers LOVE tropes, they hate clichés. Tropes become clichéd when they’re used too much – nothing more, nothing less. How tropes become clichéd can depend, which is why do many writers swear off them … but ironically a genre with NO tropes whatsoever will be dissatisfying and boring.

So my advice is EMBRACE TROPES – just research them to avoid the overly cliched ones. Sites like TVTropes and Tropedia are great places to start. You can also find an article about tropes if you click my name on this comment. Good luck!

Other than that, a question for you is: How does one avoid falling prey to tropes while staying true to the fantasy genre’s key themes and familiar aspects readers will expect to find in the story? It seems a fine line between fantasy content expectations and tropes. Thoughts?

Thank you!

Yup, genre markers are so key and we’ve all been there when it comes to forgetting them! Good luck with your projects 😀

Love that! Good luck with it, Mindy

Thanks Angela, glad you enjoyed the article and found it inspiring for your TBR shake up!