Tropes And Clichés In Writing: Top Tips You Need To Know

Did you know that tropes and clichés in writing aren’t all bad? You can apply them in your own writing to make it more effective. Today we’re going to talk about what tropes and clichés in writing are, look at some examples of each, and learn if, when, and how you should use them in your writing!

Tropes and clichés in writing: what’s covered

• What are tropes and clichés in writing?
• What is an example of a trope in writing?
• How to use tropes in your writing
• What are clichés in writing?
• How to use clichés in writing

What are tropes and clichés in writing?

Tropes and clichés in writing commonly occurring situations, characters, or plots in fiction. Using tropes and clichés in writing isn’t necessarily wrong (and in fact, doing them correctly can help you create a full-time fiction income), but you should be careful to write with tropes in a way that isn’t trite or done-to-death.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use tropes. In fact, it might be impossible to write a story without any tropes. There are countless tropes present in every story you’ll read. The difference is, some are done well, some not so much.

What is an example of a trope in writing?

There are so many tropes, you’d never be able to list them all. Any work of fiction you can think of has more than one trope. To illustrate, I’m going to pick random works from my bookshelf and list the first tropes that come to mind.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is one of my favorite books. You’ll find many classic romance tropes in Austen’s work. She invented plenty of them!

Some examples of tropes from Pride and Prejudice are:

• A mother character obsessed with her daughters getting married
• Enemies-to-lovers dynamic
• Characters having feelings they try to ignore
• A rich, snobby male love interest 
• A female love interest from a more modest lifestyle
• The charming villain (Wickham)
• The bratty teen daughter (Lydia)
• Opposites attract friendship (Darcy and Bingley)
• Rich bitch (the Bingley sisters)

As you can see, tropes include characters, dynamics between them, motivations, plots, premises, among others. I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak is another of my favorite books (and the one I always reference to teach effective prose!).

Some tropes in this book include:

• The anti-hero (Ed)
• The good bad girl (Audrey)
• Rape as drama: Ed has to help the woman whose husband regularly assaults her. This is a great example of an incredibly common trope that has run its course and does more harm than benefit. Time to think up something new, writers.
• Will they/won’t they dynamic (Audrey and Ed’s weird romance)
• Breaking the fourth wall: When a character or narrator addresses the audience/reader.

“Breaking the fourth wall” is a good example of how even some stylistic choices are tropes. Let’s look at some examples from film and television. My favorite sci-fi/dystopian show right now is The 100. (Must admit I have not read the book series.)

Let’s look at the tropes present in the television series:

• Bury your gays: This is a notorious trope where an LGBT+ character (often the only one or one of very few) is killed for little to no narrative reason OR in the same way the “rape as drama” trope is used, as a harmful and arguably lazy plot device.
• Attractive teenagers in dystopian survival scenarios: The 100 does get better in this respect, even by the end of the first season, by representing what people in these situations might actually look like. The poor kids are never clean again.
• Mercy kill: This happens numerous times throughout the series.
• Gray morality: A repeated theme in The 100 is how there are no good guys. The protagonists must make hard, unfair, often cruel decisions in order to save themselves and their friends. Everyone is looking out for themselves, and no one is better than anyone else.
• Body-count competition: The Grounders keep scars/tattoos on their bodies for how many people they’ve killed.
• Machine worship: Jaha and his followers seeing the AI as a deity falls into the machine worship trope. This is a common trope in dystopian fiction.
• Population control: Originally shown on the Ark when resources are limited in space, but it also recurs a few times later in the series as a parallel.
• Raising a host: Nightbloods raised and collected for the Commander legacy, then in a later season by the Primes as hosts.
• Jerk character has a point: This is when the character everyone hates or loves to hate makes the most logical argument (so almost any idea John Murphy has).

For a movie most of us have seen, let’s look at tropes in Mean Girls:

• Rich bitch bully
• Alpha bitch
• Beta bitch
• New bitch
• Fallen bitch
• This movie pretty much has a bitch for every bitch trope
• Montage of characters introducing another character
• Cool losers (Janis and Damian)
• Bait-and-Switch: When the edit makes it look like Regina is adding Cady to the Burn Book, but she’s really adding herself.
• Dumb blonde (Karen)
• Character eating lunch alone: Bonus points because Cady eats her lunch alone in a bathroom stall.
• Girls using Halloween as a cover to dress skimpy
• Frenemies dynamic: Nearly every friendship at some point in the movie

Most of the obvious Mean Girls tropes are character and character dynamic tropes, because that’s what the movie is about, different personalities blending and clashing.

How to use tropes in your writing

As you can see, tropes and clichés in writing aren’t necessarily bad things. They’re just common and recognizable themes in storytelling.

However, tropes and clichés in writing should be used intentionally, because your reader will have preconceived ideas about most tropes. Think of a fantasy story with an ogre. Ogres are a creature trope. Every reader will have a different idea of an ogre when they see it presented in a story.

Maybe they have an unfounded negative feeling, just because they’re predisposed to an opinion based on the stories they’ve read with villainous ogres. Maybe they have an unfounded positive feeling, just because they’ve seen Shrek. 

Consider a writer who is unaware of the “bury your gays” trope because they don’t consume media where it has been portrayed. They might include an LGBT+ character who’s killed off. They might consider that fair representation because they simply aren’t aware it’s a harmful trope repeated in all forms of media.

Being aware of the tropes and clichés in writing that you use is imperative, because most readers are aware of them.

You can be aware of tropes by:

• Consuming multiple forms of media in your genre
• Research
• One-on-one conversations with minority groups included in your story that you yourself are not a part of
• Hiring a sensitivity reader of that minority

We should avoid tropes and clichés in writing that promote harmful stereotypes or regressive perspectives on marginalized groups. Tropes are something to be aware of, but we can embrace using them intentionally!

What are clichés in writing?

A cliché is a phrase that is overused or stereotypical. Sometimes a trope that has been overdone, is severely dated, or was trash to begin with and is referred to as a cliché or a “clichéd trope.”

While “trope” is not something to be immediately associated with negative connotations, “cliché” is something to avoid or “fix.”

Clichés are indicative of amateur or lazy writing, but there are ways to write them well! I’ll get into how you can effectively write with clichés in a bit. First, let’s look at an example list of cliché phrases.

Examples of cliché phrases:

• Gilded cage
• Head over heels
• Only time will tell
• The calm before the storm
• Kiss and makeup 
• Woke up on the wrong side of the bed
• Gut-wrenching
• Avoid like the plague
• Low-hanging fruit
• I stopped dead in my tracks
• Stealing candy from a baby
• Right up your alley
• Play your cards right
• All bets are off
• All in due time
• Batten down the hatches
• Read between the lines
• Been there, done that
• Put out feelers
• Rain on my parade
• Stabbed him in the back
• Fire in my blood
• Blood ran cold
• Digging yourself into a hole
• Get your toes wet
• Not the brightest bulb in the box
• Pot calling the kettle black
• On thin ice

You get it.

How to use clichés in writing

Amateur writers often default to tropes and clichés in writing because they’re easy to write! Clichés specifically have been around for a while. They’ve gathered connotations and most people know what they mean. It’s like a writing shortcut: a set of words that already carry all of the meaning you want to use.

However, using clichés as a shortcut just makes you look like a lazy writer. You don’t want to write something that’s already been written. Good news! You can use clichés and still write strong prose by reinventing or repurposing the cliché.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers boasts this advice about re-working a cliché:

“…before going with the cliché, give some thought to the possibility of ‘turning’ it, altering it slightly to render the phrasing less familiar. In a celebrated novel we edited, the writer used the phrase ‘they vanished into thin air’ to avoid a lengthy, complicated explanation. We suggested a change to ‘they vanished into thick air,’ which fit the poetic, steamy atmosphere of the European city in which the scene was set.”

Tropes and clichés in writing: repurpose them

If you have a cliché you’d love to use, even swapping one word (like thick for thin) might be enough to bring new life to it. You might add to a cliché, like Taylor Swift in the song Endgame. She takes the cliché “bury the hatchet” and turns it to “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps to where I put ‘em.”

She achieves the immediate cultural understanding of what it means to bury the hatchet (forgiveness, putting away old disputes) and adds a layer of keeping maps to where they are so she can retrieve that dispute whenever she wants to.

Another example of adding to the end of a cliché is a line Harlan Ellison wrote, where he took the cliché “she looked like a million bucks” and turned it to, “she looked like a million bucks tax free.” Just a tiny glimpse of a new aspect can make a cliché impactful.

From one of my own stories, I have the line: “A child was raised on stories of crows—dark creatures with black intentions.” While not direct clichés, a black crow and a dark intent are expected.

Swapping language like that is referred to as “diverting expectations,” and it is much the same concept as repurposing a cliché.

Bonus tip: if you know a reader will easily guess how your sentence will end, you might be using tired language. Grab some clichés from the list above and try your hand at repurposing them in a comment!

Tropes and clichés in writing: sneak them into dialogue

Another way you can get away with using a tropes and clichés in writing is in dialogue. People speak in clichés, so if you have a dorky character who uses clichés, that’s fine! Anything goes in dialogue. In prose, where you need to show and not tell, you’re on thin ice.

We know that clichés aren’t all bad. How do we know if we’re using them well? Repurposing clichés, as we just saw, can you give you an original piece of writing.

A good way to think about if you’re using a cliché for the right reasons it is to ask yourself if you’re using it for clarity of meaning, since clichés are widely known and understood, or if you’re using them for a shortcut.

Easy writing is most often lazy writing. The skinny of it is: Avoid clichés unless you can use them in an intentional and creative way.

Tropes and clichés in writing: take your next step

Now we know the good and bad of tropes and clichés in writing, how to spot them, and how to use them. Take your next step and watch our free class, How To Write And Publish A Fiction Book!