anexperimentallife:

adamussutekh:

I just wanna let y’all know that you do fanfic tropes all of the time, we just don’t describe them like beginning writers do. You:

• Push your shoes off with your toes or with the tip of your shoe, most likely. Props for drama if you yank your converse or your vans or your boots off like a soldier in a scyfi drama, but otherwise, you’re “toeing your shoes off”
• Humans are much better at dissecting scents than we give ourselves credit for. If you sit there long enough, you could dissect how your friend smells. I smell like “old, beat up cars, the sour citrus he isn’t supposed to have, and something musty and natural and unique to him that clings to all of his clothes.” In order that’s old flannel, three day old hair mousse, and fish tank water. Smells like cigarettes and oils cling to your clothes, stuff like fishtanks and the food in your kitchen seeps into your belongings. Don’t feel bad about describing scents, people carry our houses with us everywhere. 
• Have you ever pet someone else’s hair? That’s “carding your fingers through.” That’s it. It’s the same thing.
• Ever walked around barefoot? Its three am and you’re trying to make Dark Lunch? You’ve padded around. You signal to other people nonverbally whether its coughing or sighing that you’re there so that you don’t scare them. 
• Smirking is a thing most of us do with our face. Grinning, looking cheeky, and raising our eyebrows are also all things your face does. Sorry
• You might not get this if you’re a straight girl whose never had sex, but sometimes that little strip of skin between ya shirt and ya hips? The mouth can go there. That’s an intimate place to touch and its a vulnerable place to be exposed. Overused maybe, but a valid way to show a shift in the situation. 
• We all sigh!! Are some of y’all really saying that sighing isn’t a thing you do ten thousand times a week?? You don’t sigh when someone says something stupid as shit?? You don’t sigh when you gotta get up?? 
• SAID IS A VALID WORD
• Everything on your face casts shadows, I’m sorry you have weak eyelashes, or that somehow your brows are flat with your eyeballs
• People laugh silently! I’m sorry you’ve never laughed that hard!! People giggle! People snort! People double over and move and flail! Have you ever fucking laughed?
• For that matter how do y’all not blush and can you teach me
• I’d also like to say sorry if: your heart has never skipped a beat reading something terrible, or when you saw someone you liked even platonically, or if you’ve never been so surprised all you could do was blink, that you never looked at someone like you loved them, and that you somehow never fucking show any emotion in your voice or your posture at all

Tl;Dr: Some of y’all are dragging people for shit you don’t know how to describe and damn if you ain’t still reading things and then telling beginning writers that they’re describing impossible things and writing weirdly when y’all don’t even write shit, its obnoxious as hell. To y’all that do write and are aggressively against this post, I bet you sure as hell use EPITHETS INAPPROPRIATELY ANYWAY, DON’T YA?

OP knows the deal. Besides, anyone who thinks “using tropes” in fiction is a bad thing doesn’t know what a trope is to begin with, and is just looking for ways to make themselves feel better about their pitiful existence by pretending they know what they’re talking about to put others down; you can safely ignore anything an “anti-trope” person says about writing in general, and… well, anything, really.

Every story you love uses tropes. Every type of protagonist, antagonist, and conflict is a trope. Everything written by Shakespeare,
Miéville, Atwood, Gaiman, Pratchett, and so on? Chock full o’ chewy trope goodness. “Ordinary person becomes a hero” is a trope. “Seemingly-ordinary person is actually the Chosen One” is a trope. “Tragic Hero” is a trope. “Human against __________” (fill in the blank) is a trope.

“Trope” and “cliché “

are NOT synonyms. Certain tropes can (and have) become  tired and
cliché through over-use, but even clichés are okay if you do them well enough (or if you hang a lantern on them) and know when to stop.

Using a tired, worn-out, overused trope is one thing. Using tropes in general, though? Without tropes, you have no stories.

So what is a trope? Here’s a quick and dirty run-down. Usually when we talk about tropes in writing groups, we mean anything in a story that can be expressed as a simple concept, and that we can find general examples of elsewhere. (“Okay, so you’re going with the ‘reluctant hero’ and ‘tragic here’ tropes here.”) It’s no crime not to know every term professionals use when discussing writing, but it’s pretty fucked up to criticize someone for using tropes when you don’t even know what they are.

Oh, and just to go a bit harder on one particular point before I go–people who say things like, “said is dead” should just… stop saying things. Like, in general. If your story is boring with “said,” it’s going to remain boring no matter how many thesauruses you pillage and strip-mine for increasingly-stretched synonyms.