Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

How Tropes and Clichés Turned Out to Be More Challenging Than We Thought

Jaym Gates and Monica Valentinelli recently coedited an anthology of trope smashing stories, Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, with a table of contents including such authors as Nisi Shawl, Alyssa Wong, John Hornor Jacobs, Alethea Kontis, Ferrett Steinmetz, and many more. They knew they had a stellar lineup of writers and a fantastic theme for their anthology, but inverting tropes turned out to be more challenging than they expected…

Jaym Gates:

I wrote a piece a while back about how the classic Hero’s Journey applied to the Munchkin game. It was an interesting—and challenging—piece. It also made me think about trope inversion, right about the time Monica and I started working on this.

See, trope inversion is easy. You take a thing and turn it upside down, and tell a story. Bam. Suddenly your big bad hero can’t lift a stick and relies on his wits rather than his hands.

Wait, that’s been done. A lot. SFF is full of inverted tropes, if you look, to the point where those inversions have become their own tropes. SFF is all about the nerdy boy who ends up being a hero, the bad-ass woman who learns to love, the villain who just wants a hug. Tropes. But tropes that were, at one time, flipped tropes themselves. Flip them again, and you have the original trope. It’s a tricky little ouroboros, isn’t it?

So the question becomes: how do you successfully invert a trope without falling into a well-worn rut?

In this book, the answer seems to be that the trope doesn’t necessarily need to be flipped at a 180, but maybe turned on its side, shaken around, possibly turned inside out. It turns out there’s a lot of fresh ground when you come at a trope from the side. (Bonus: it can’t see you coming, and you can get a jump on it. Tropes are slippery, pernicious little things. You need all the advantages you can get.)

Subverting or inverting a trope is a subtle skill, and one that can take a lifetime to develop. I was consistently impressed with how carefully our authors thought through their trope and found a way to make it new and fresh, while still keeping it true to its origin.

Remember: don’t just flip it upside down, you’ll just get a slightly different trope. Circle it slowly, warily. Don’t let it know you’re there. Keep downwind. Look for weaknesses, and when the time is right…

…wait, what?

Monica Valentinelli

On the surface, it may seem as if flipping a trope is easy to do. In our case, many of the authors, like Anton Strout and his selected trope, The Chosen One, discovered that the inverse of a trope was also a trope. To address those issues, the authors took the commentary of their trope further; they used named conventions, humor, and other storytelling elements to provide a deeper examination of that trope to tell a great trope-smashing story.

The issue, for us, wasn’t the examination of the tropes themselves. I knew the writers we approached were talented storytellers and essayists. Throughout this project, there was a process of discovery that sparked new and creative ideas. As we were collecting the final drafts for the stories, however, we recognized that there was a potential snag. We wanted to identify the tropes examined in the stories, but at the same time we didn’t want to create or give the impression that this was a gimmick. Calling out what the trope was, either in the Table of Contents or beneath the story’s title name, would affect the reader by setting expectations that neither the authors or us intended.

To address the issue, we decided to add a section to the book listing the tropes examined, their definition, and why the authors chose that particular trope. This served as a way to underline the selected tropes to enhance reader satisfaction by highlighting what motivated our authors to tell the stories they did. Putting the tropes last also removed the possibility that a reader’s expectations would be swayed, and this helped preserve the artistic integrity of the goal for our collection: a body of literary work that serves as a commentary on tropes within the genre.