Hello, writers. Tonight’s topic was suggested to me by something someone said last week. To wit:
Evil mirrors scare me to death. --Emmet
I never really thought of evil mirrors as a trope before, but there’s no question that magic mirrors are a trope.
We’ve talked before about getting your characters from Central Casting. Tropes are events, relationships, threats, Macguffins, story building-blocks that come from Central Plotting.
That sounds negative. But… how to say this? Tropes are good. Without tropes, it’s nearly impossible to tell your story. Even stories that break new ground, like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, rely on tropes. (Red-tape-spewing government office. Alien invasion. Private spaceship. Societal misfit piloting private spaceship. Robot with mind of its own.)
Originality lies in doing something to the tropes to make them unique… twisting them, reversing them, parodizing them, combining them in new ways, taking them one step further than they’ve ever been taken before.
From time to time you see a story in which the writer has done his or her level best to have no tropes-- no previously used relationships, problems, conflicts, threats, Macguffins, etc. And the general reader reaction tends to be “Huh?” Composing a story without tropes is like appearing in public without clothes: It’s possible you’ll still be able to get people to listen to you, but it’s going to be an added challenge.
J.R.R. Tolkien said that every tale floats on a cauldron of story. Terry Pratchett said that fantasy writers (and you might as well add, most other writers) take things out of the pot, and throw things into it. My brother says that people generally like to be told stories they recognize.
Please don’t take this as shooting down the whole idea of originality. Employing tropes to tell your story is no more unoriginal than using the English language to tell your story.
Just recently I noticed that my current WIP is wall-to-wall tropes. No one seems to mind.
It’s not the trope that matters, it’s what you do with it.
So, tonight’s challenge:
Use the magic mirror trope. It was good enough for Snow White, Harry Potter, and Kilgore Trout, and it’s good enough for us. The mirror doesn't have to be evil. It can be anything you want—sulky, bad-ass, motherly, whiny.
The callow youth—remember the callow youth?
A callow youth (male or female) is the Chosen One who must obtain the sacred jewel of Togwogmagog in order to save the kingdom.
The callow youth is trapped in Trope Castle, seeking a means of escape from Villainous V. Villain, when s/he encounters the magic mirror.
Write the scene.
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