Unexpected tropes

[Kumquatqueen]

Do other people find unexpected similarities between their stories? Not the main topic, but small things.

For example, many of my stories reference the AIDS epidemic and Section 28, which isn't too surprising given my age and s28 was the first political issue I really got involved in.

I was more surprised when I noticed most of my stories seem to contain characters having full English breakfasts. Fulfilling a fantasy I didn't even know I had - though handily one that can be easily fulfilled in real life, too.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

Do other people find unexpected similarities between their stories? Not the main topic, but small things.

For example, many of my stories reference the AIDS epidemic and Section 28, which isn't too surprising given my age and s28 was the first political issue I really got involved in.

I was more surprised when I noticed most of my stories seem to contain characters having full English breakfasts. Fulfilling a fantasy I didn't even know I had - though handily one that can be easily fulfilled in real life, too.

Not unexpected, but I always add a major character from one story as a minor character in another. I do have a tendency to use the same names over and over.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Th third time any of my characters watched a fireworks display, I decided it was not a trope, it was a motif.

 

[KeithD]

Yeah, more a motif, I think. And I also think that an author's regular readers enjoy seeing them pop up now and again.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Yeah, more a motif, I think. And I also think that an author's regular readings enjoy seeing them pop up now and again.

Particularly in a series, when they can provide a resonance between scenes.

 

[HeyYoureThatGuy]

Awkward, broken people. (They say write what you know.)

 

[RetroFan]

Some tropes I often deliberately use, for example 'blonde-brunette-redhead' or four temperament ensemble personalities for the characters, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric.

I often use two names for support characters, Chris for male and Lisa for female.

In three of my four stories set in Queensland Australia one of the characters is a dentist. Bridget from Bridget the Bossy Bridezilla is a dentist, Melissa's ex husband in The Mystery of Melissa is a dentist, while Dakota and Richie's Karen-like mother Jodie from Body Swap With Sister's Boyfriend is also a dentist (heaven help any of her patients when she has PMS).

I often reference the Titanic, Hindenburg or World Trade Center in my stories. For example, senile Stan from 'Debbie the Dumb Gold Digger' which is set in 1991 was born on April 10 1912 the day the ship set sail, while his vapid girlfriend Debbie has to be convinced that the Titanic was real and not a make believe ship. Todd, a stupid fat bully from 'The PTA Queen Bee & the Teen Rebel' is compared to the Hindenburg by his sister, but it takes him nearly half an hour to figure out that she is insulting him for his obesity problem. Dennis, Allison's weird husband from the PTA Queen Bee stories works at the WTC North Tower.

In a more recent story 'Grumpy Humphrey's Easy Wife' the misanthropic Humphrey Grim was born on the exact day the Titanic sank, while some students at the high school where Humphrey Grim teaches tie a balloon filled with hydrogen to the wing mirror of his automobile, the resulting explosion when the angry teacher bursts what he thinks is a helium filled balloon with his cigarette described as a scale re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Constantly. My stories are full of repeated imagery, to the extent that I now think, often, "Oh no, there's that one again," and go find another image. My tropes spread like wildfire - there's one, right there.

 

[NotWise]

Also more of a motif than a trope, most of my characters are young professionals, or students studying to enter a profession.

In what I think is an actual trope, my young professionals are often stressed nearly to their breaking point by the demands placed on junior staff.

 

[yowser]

The converse

Not exactly what you asked for, but I had trouble answering. Oddly, it is much easier for me to list the opposite: what tendencies and behaviors none of my favorite characters exhibit, or situations that never appear for them.

Cussing, profanity of all manner, even some squeamishness about employing common, garden-variety, sexual slang.

How singular. I had never considered this.

Thanks for an illuminating question.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Do other people find unexpected similarities between their stories? Not the main topic, but small things.

For example, many of my stories reference the AIDS epidemic and Section 28, which isn't too surprising given my age and s28 was the first political issue I really got involved in.

I was more surprised when I noticed most of my stories seem to contain characters having full English breakfasts. Fulfilling a fantasy I didn't even know I had - though handily one that can be easily fulfilled in real life, too.

I noticed recently that several of my stories feature an "attempting to share a bed platonically" scene. Sometimes the attempt is successful, sometimes not. At first I couldn't figure out why, then I remembered that it's what happened the night my partner and I first met.

(We were not entirely successful.)

 

[KeithD]

My characters walk into places to find nude/compromising photos/paintings of themselves on the wall fairly frequently and the story is some different explanation for that. Even more, I play a motif of a doorway covered with a beaded curtain. A character going through the curtain is entering new sexual life. One of my early published anthologies is titled Beyond the Beaded Curtain, and I've continued dropping that motif in here and there in the subsequent decade.

 

[SisterJezabel]

Overcritical has stopped reading my stories as they are too formulaic apparently! I'm actually writing a story at the moment where there isn't a nurse as a main character- IKR!

 

[AlexBailey]

Common fictional names

I'm a new writer for CD/TG stories and have been writing a mostly fictionalized autobiography. I've used real first names of people I known for many of my characters and been surprised to find they are very common for my genre.

The name 'Alex' is often used for TG characters here on Lit -- so much so that I would have reconsidered using it if I had read more stories before I started writing. I suppose it is somewhat androgynous -- something I've always liked about my name, but I would not have expected it to be so common.


Not mine; but suspense/horror writer Dean Koontz has the flowering vine 'bougianvellia' in almost every one of his books that I've read. It's become a fun thing to watch out for -- 'Oh there it is!'