Tropes aren’t just keys to a story’s hidden meaning, they’re also literary Easter eggs tucked throughout the work, each revealing a new clue when discovered and untucked. They’re ear worms that burrow into the reader’s mind, planting memorable hints of the author’s true intentions. They’re verbal transformers of ideas into narrative trail markers. When used effectively, they signal what the story is really about.
Happy Lunar New Year, Loreates,
Welcome to the Year of the Fire Horse— get ready to rock and roll. According to my sources, horse years are more motion than pause, more momentum than contemplation. And the Fire Horse, in particular, is energetic, determined, action-oriented.
Let’s hope, pray, and work to channel that energy into restoring sanity, science, and democracy to America — and supercharging your writing life!
As you know, I’m here to help with the latter goal. And I’ve been wanting for some time to write about one magical key that many of us overlook when striving to bring deeper meaning into our work. That key again came to mind recently as I was listening to the audio version of Sally Rooney’s wonderful novel Intermezzo (likely to be mentioned in multiple posts here in coming weeks). There’s a single word that recurs in this story, over and over in dialogue, exposition, internal monologue, and each time it surfaces it shows a new facet, a new way of interpreting and understanding the characters and their core dilemma.
This key is called a literary trope, the very topic I want to unpack with you in today’s post.
Read on!
Aimee
Tropes are Treasures…“Obviously”
I was well into Sally Rooney’s novel Intermezzo when I realized that the recurring tic of the word “obviously” was an essential trope. It popped up in every character’s dialogue. It punctuated their thoughts. And its appearance ebbed and flowed in barely noticeable but significant patterns throughout the book.
At first the usage seemed reflexive, a habitual, awkward space-filler like “um” or “like,” delivered with an implied shrug of abdication. “Obviously” the character wasn’t in full control of their words or thoughts, because they were saying and doing the obvious: conforming to general convention. But as the story progressed, their conformity became less obvious. In fact, doing the obvious became a source of pain, even anguish. Toward the end of the story the characters used the word far less frequently and when they did, they delivered it ironically, flipping its meaning upside down and inside out. Because, in fact, the whole point of the novel is that nothing true and important about life is “obvious,” and the insistent pretense that it is can break you.
That’s when I realized this trope had been working its magic on me from the very beginning, turning the key this way and that with every repetition, tumbling ever new hints and clues in a highly strategic pattern to guide me toward the novel’s true meaning.
Just like a good trope should.
But not all tropes are good. Even the dictionary definition suggests as much:
Trope: borrowed from Latin tropus "figure of speech" (Medieval Latin, "embellishment to the sung parts of the Mass"), borrowed from Greek trópos "turn, way, manner, style, figurative expression."
a word or expression used in a figurative sense : figure of speech
a common theme or device : motif
Clichés are no good in literary writing. Nor are overused, “common,” themes or devices.
So, how to navigate the wide world of tropes, to make these figures of speech work for, instead of against, your writing? First, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of this device.
What exactly is a literary trope?
Tropes are chimerical agents. They owe their impact to the natural human tendency to make associations. We hear one word and think of the object it represents, the qualities of that object, the people who use that word and how it sounds in their throats, what they do with the object, what else they mean when they use that word, whether it has a moral dimension, whether it signals something appealing or negative, complicated or simple, and on and on and on.
We don’t put in all this work for every word we read or hear. We’d be paralyzed if we did. But we do put in this work whenever a word or phrase attracts our attention, when it sends up a quiet flare of significance. We notice that a word or image recurs in a story in particular situations, and we instinctively wonder why, what it means, what the invisible operator inside this language is trying to tell us.
A literary trope is the phrase, term, or image that sends up the flare.
Other metaphors suggest themselves… Tropes aren’t just keys to a story’s hidden meaning, they’re also literary Easter eggs tucked throughout the work, each revealing a new clue when discovered and untucked. They’re ear worms that burrow into the reader’s mind, planting memorable hints of the author’s true intentions. They’re verbal transformers of ideas into narrative trail markers. When used effectively, they signal what the story is really about.
Cheap tropes litter our everyday language. We talk about the “fox in the hen house”, the “bug in the machine.” We say, “All hands on deck,” and “You get what you pay for,” when no hands, decks, or payments are anywhere in sight. Often we use tropes like “pig,” “cougar,” “doll,” and “hunk” as prejudicial stereotypes. Whether innocent or offensive, cheap tropes function as automatic shorthand. Because they’re widely used and familiar, they’re easily interpreted. Too easily, if you use them in your writing without giving their meaning a distinctive twist.
Literary tropes work by surprising us, opening a new way to consider a character or subject, suggesting a thematic dimension that’s bubbling in the subtext, forcing the reader to consider the story from an unexpected angle. Effective literary tropes are shortcuts to meaning and understanding, but they’re not easy shortcuts. They require thought and care on the part of the author, and they make readers think.
Almost any feature that represents an idea or interpretation of the work can be considered a trope, but the term most often refers to figurative images or phrases that repeat the way Rooney used the word “obviously.” Here are a few common types of these tropes:
Metaphor: one thing equals another. The sun = a raging demon.
Simile: one thing is likened to another. This martini is dry as the Sahara.
Oxymoron: two parts of the whole contradict each other. Open secret.
Synecdoche: one part represents the whole. I need new wheels.
Metonymy: one example stands in for a larger category or concept. Wall Street had a bad day.
Tropes can also be structural conventions, like the chase scene in a thriller, the red herring in a mystery, or high noon in a western. Used lazily, they can feel manipulative and cheap, but if subverted with imagination they can produce novel new forms, like the film One Battle After Another or the faux detective story "Death and the Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges.
Lazy writing can turn characters, too, into tropes. The sleepy old woman. The mustachioed bandit. Goody two-shoes. Take any of these figures at face value, and they’re as phony as paper dolls. But give the tropes an innovative twist, and you suddenly have an old woman with lifelong narcolepsy, a bandit who’s too ashamed of his harelip to shave, a goody two-shoes who shoplifts stiletto heels (stiletto heels = synecdoche, btw).
Tropes can be a useful starting point in developing characters, but never stop until they surprise you with some condition or problem that makes them interesting and unique. Otherwise you’ll be trafficking in stereotypes, and unless you have a solid experimental reason to do this, your readers won’t forgive you.
Tropes can work wonders
I think it’s rare for an author to identify the central tropes in a story when composing early drafts. Most often they emerge in the writing, pushing up like little green shoots from the subconscious, and we only notice them when re-reading what the subconscious has planted. The image of a goose in Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl. The girl wearing a man’s fedora in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. The characters in Intermezzo constantly saying and thinking the word “obviously.”
Spontaneous tropes are often the most fruitful Easter eggs of meaning. Once you’ve identified them, you can study and play with them. Turn them over and inside out. Look at every possible association they might hold for your characters, your thematic spine, your story. Do these connections align with your intentions? What are they telling you that you hadn’t realized before? Are they perhaps directing you toward a new and deeper truth? If so, you may have struck literary gold.
The question you need to ask of each trope is: Are you telegraphing something important? Because tropes are only useful if their signals point readers to a meaningful association. A recurring image of a fruit bowl might strike you as promising, but if it fails to connect to your story’s deeper themes, it’s no use to you.
To work well, tropes need — or you need to imbue them with —multiple dimensions. Their implications need to expand and turn and multiply each time they reappear on the page. A good trope never means the same thing twice.
Patterns play an enormous role in showcasing these dimensions. Tropes rarely appear in isolation. Most often, they repeat. Music might play whenever a particular character comes onstage. Birdsong could function as an omen. Or maybe bursts of sunshine are woven into the overall tapestry like jewels that cluster around signal moments then recede until they’re needed to illuminate another critical turn.
The best pattern for your tropes will depend on their function in your overall story. You might need them only in certain sections. You might change tropes as the story progresses. You might tuck them into the background, like a patch of wallpaper. Or you might enshrine them in the title.
By layering his central trope into the title of his novella Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr gives readers a heads-up that walls hold the key to this story. At first, the reference seems to be literal, a physical wall of notes and cartridges that contain what’s left of the main character’s memories. But the wall also represents the boundary of her memory. Then, as the story extends into other characters’ experience of a socially and economically segregated future South Africa, the wall takes on racial and class connotations. The trope thickens and dissolves, divides and connects, working all the time to introduce new story angles, new ways in to meaning.
More about the craftsmanship of Memory Wall here:
