Writing Exercises, Courtesy of TVTropes

I posted an earlier blog post on the Facebook wall of my friend Alex Hughes since I had referenced a comment she made during writing group in it.

This spawned a discussion about the use of TVTropes for marketing.  She is skeptical of the concept, while I think it would be a good way to do viral marketing.  Meanwhile, Terra LeMay warned that the Merriam-Webster definition of a "trope" also includes the word "cliche" and so if there are a lot of tropes in one's work, that might be a bad sign.

(Somewhere along the way, someone posted a "Periodic Table" of fiction using individual TVTropes as the elements.  That got discussed as well.)

Based on these discussions, I came up with a few writing exercises that could be useful for brainstorming or stretching one's writing muscles.  Both exercises use TVTropes.  Here goes...

Exercise #1: Take randomly-selected tropes and try to include them in a story.  Bonus points if they're from totally different genres, so getting a sensible storyline out of them takes hard work.

Exercise #2: Inspired by Terra's comment about how she only uses tropes when she wants to "upend or invert them."  Basically, your mission is to take one or more tropes and do the exact opposite.

Here's something I came up with as a joke to entertain Alex and Terra but figured could be an interesting "inverted trope" story element:

The only thing that really trips the "cliche alarm" in my opinion in Battle for the Wastelands is the destruction of Carroll Town, which begins Andrew Sutter's journey that will eventually take him across the Iron Desert and back again.  On TVTropes, this is called "Doomed Hometown."

So instead of the protagonist beginning his quest for revenge on the Big Bad after the Big Bad destroys his hometown, kills his family, etc., he begins his quest because the Big Bad has decided to make his hometown his new capital, a major military base, etc.  A lot people he knows lose their land (either through eminent domain or simply being chased off) due to the need for palaces, defensive works, etc., while others are forced to sell because property taxes have gotten too high for them to pay.

Perhaps the resulting conflict can be called the Gentrification War.  :)

That could be an interesting subversion of the "Doomed Hometown" trope because although gentrification will hurt some people, it will also benefit others (people supplying the palaces and military bases with goods or labor, frex)--destroying the town and killing or enslaving the people is bad for everyone.  If the hero eventually defeats the Big Bad, he'll find a lot of "his people" aren't going to be too pleased.