Fiction is many things: entertaining, enlightening, educational, escapist, and then some. Many of us read to be taken away from our normal, mundane realities—even wrenched away through chilling or momentous ups and downs—only to be brought back down to a trusted reality that on some level we knew, or hoped, would arrive all along.
You know what I mean: despite the odds—boy gets girl; hero overcomes the villain; the best friends’ feud ends in hugs; the detective overcomes every obstacle to solve the unusual mystery and winds up a better person for it, too. These expected results are otherwise known as tropes, and each genre has its own unique blend of them.
While book critics and English professors may rail about these tired and tedious tropes—many of us still yearn for them—just take a look at the titles on the various bestseller lists. Tropes promise us an order and a joy that real life cannot always deliver. Moreover, most of the bestselling genres of fiction, from romance to thrillers to cozy mysteries, depend on them. As do the millions of book buyers who eat up each new release from these authors’ latest. What is it about tropes that we love so much, and are they always a bad thing?
