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
Save the Date!
Tuesday, March 3 at 11 am PT
Well Published: Short Stories with Rachel Khong
I’m absolutely thrilled to invite you to my chat with Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans, about the release of her new intriguingly speculative story collection My Dear You. Please register and tune in live using this link:
Well Published, Live! is a monthly video feature of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore, offering interviews with recently published authors and publishing professionals about the nitty gritty of getting… well published!
