Anne here, and today I'm thinking about tropes. "What's a trope?" you wonder? In popular fiction, it's a frequently revisited, generally beloved theme or set-up for a story. In romance it might be "friends to lovers" or "convenient marriage", "the ugly duckling", "a Cinderella story", "the Innocent and the Playboy," — you get the idea. There are dozens of tropes and new ones (or variations on old ones) are popping up all the time. (Fifty shades of trope, anyone?)
Publishers like writers to explore tropes as it makes the job of categorizing (and therefore selling) books easier, so much so that some publishers (for instance Harlequin) have titles that are not so much a book title as a phrase containing words that signal to the reader what tropes the story will explore. "The Sheikh's Convenient Bride", "The Rancher's Secret Baby". And readers who like those tropes will pick up those books.
A trope carries a promise to the reader. Readers love certain tropes and will return to them again and again. (Me, I'm a sucker for a mail-order bride story.) But the thing about tropes is that they are also clichés to some extent, so a good writer needs to twist the trope in some way to make it fresh.
When I first started writing romance, I didn't know about tropes — not consciously anyway. My first book, Gallant Waif, was, I suppose a bit of a Cinderella story. My heroine, Kate, was newly orphaned, home from the war, and in dire straits. The hero's grandmother effectively acts as the fairy godmother, throwing Kate together with the grandmother's wounded, reclusive grandson. Two people recovering from very different war wounds . . . But when it was reviewed I was startled to see that some people were calling it a "Beauty and the Beast" story. I didn't see it that way at all.
My second book, Tallie's Knight, was a positive stew of tropes, though I still didn't really understand tropes, except that I'd decided to write a convenient marriage story. (Thank you Georgette Heyer.) But it wasn't just a convenient marriage story, it also contained elements of Cinderella and the ugly duckling, there was a road trip (they went on the Grand Tour), there was some "making love to a stranger" in it, they were trapped for a while (a cabin romance) and there was an element of "the lost heir" as well, and probably a few more. But I didn't know about tropes, I was just trying to write the best story I could. (And both of those books were rated Desert Island Keepers from All About Romance — Tallie's Knight, Gallant Waif, so I must have done something right.)
My third book, An Honorable Thief, was much less "tropey." I still had no idea about tropes, just writing the best book I could. It was inspired by a job I'd done while a university student, reading the earliest editions of the Fiji Times for a professor, and noting down the information he wanted. But at heart I was a lover of stories, and while I collected his dreary statistics, I also gobbled up stories about what it was like in those wild early days of Colonialism. One story was about a gambling cheat who'd been dumped by the irate officers of the NSW Corps on the first ship leaving Sydney Harbour, and ended up in Fiji. His wife and daughter were left to follow as best they could. I wondered about that girl, and umpteen years later, wrote a story about her, calling it An Honorable Thief. (And scored one of the first "headless" covers, which I quite liked — very few heroes or heroines on book covers are as I've envisaged them, so headless was as good as anything. <g>) But AAR still liked it.
The more I wrote and interacted with the romance reading and writing community, the more I became aware of tropes. And some appeal to me more than others. I've often revisited the convenient marriage trope — indeed, my last series (the Marry In— titles) was given that series label by my publisher. But it also appeals to me as a reader. I am fascinated with the situation so many historical heroines faced, where they were married to a man they hardly knew, and just had to make the best of it. Of course, being a romantic, I want them to be in love by the end, and the journey each couple takes to earn their happy ending is something I never quite know — until I've written it.
That's where I am at the moment. I have a contract for a new series, and I'm feeling out who the characters are, and what their issues are, and wondering what kind of a journey they're going to take me on. It's part exciting and part nerve-wracking. As for what tropes might pop up — at this stage I think there might be an element of "enemies to lovers", a "second chance at love" thread, possibly a snippet of "ugly duckling/Cinderella" . . . In other words, when the book is finished I'll (probably) be able to answer the question. <g>
So, what about you? Do you think about tropes when you're choosing a book? Do you have favorite tropes you enjoy? Are there any you tend to avoid?