According to Tvtropes.org (a Wikipedia of tropes), a trope is "a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize." One of my favorite examples, space piracy, is a science fiction trope. Tropes work because sometimes readers want a story they know they'll like, but they also don't want to be bored. Here's how to freshen up tropes in your stories.
R E Stearns by Carlos Romero
Know the Tropes
You can't keep tropes fresh if you don't know they're there! Read all about them, starting with tropes of your story's genre (romance, science fiction, young adult, etc.). Tvtropes.org or All the Tropes are great places to begin, but lots of blogs cover tropes and clichés. Talk to media-savvy friends, and people who have experience with what you're writing about. You probably know someone who's seen it all before.
Understand WHY a Trope is a Trope
As shortcuts to describe complicated situations, tropes make certain promises. If you know what those promises are, you can meet reader expectations differently. A "My God, what have I done?" moment is satisfying because the character is acknowledging their mistake. Your character doesn't have to acknowledge theirs the same way hundreds of fictional characters have before.
Skip the Bad Ones
Some tropes (e.g. gay and black characters don't get happy endings), are harmful. Arguably there are ways to use harmful tropes in a considerate, empowering way, but part of the reason that these tropes cause harm is that they are extremely common. Do you want your story to be part of the problem?
Keep the Parts You Like, Throw Out the Parts You Don't
One trope which enables mysteries and thrillers is the absolutely useless local police department. But maybe you don't want to portray a whole profession as helpless and hopeless. You can keep the police from doing all the work in your story in other ways. Does the ransom note include a line like "Involve the police, and he dies"?
Double Down
This works especially well with genre-specific tropes. Why include a single meet-cute, when you could have two or three and start a love triangle (or other love polygon)? You could include your protagonist's cranky neighbor in your story just for the snide remarks, or you could make the neighbor legitimately dangerous. Extremes are entertaining.
Add Modern Twists
It's amazing where you can get cell signal these days. Classic moving-into-a-haunted-house stories don’t include main characters documenting the experience on Pinterest and Instagram. Russian influence on Western politics and society was big in 40-year-old espionage thrillers, and now it's back in new, weird ways which can be incorporated into your story.
Be Accurate
We know more about history, biology, and human behavior than we used to. If you're not writing about modern times, let your setting and characters behave in ways we now know reality does. Modern fiction is full of cliched inaccuracies too. Here are 100 popular misconceptions you can leave out of your story's universe, except as a mark of ignorance! That will help your story stand out to knowledgeable readers, no matter what tropes you use.
Keep Some Tropes, not ALL of Them
Tropes are shorthand for more complicated concepts, so it's possible to use some and not others, creating a pleasant mix of familiar and new. For example, it is not absolutely necessary to recreate Joseph Campbell's entire hero's journey for your male protagonist under the age of 20. However, including the steps you like best can let you spend more time showing off new ideas.
Carry Tropes to Their Logical Conclusions
Some tropes always appear the same way: vampires have to hide their identities, literary marriages are loveless, post-apocalyptic futures are gray. Consider what else those realities could affect. Would there be more 24-hour businesses with a vampire workforce? Would society develop a socially codified practice for cheating on spouses (and has our society already done so?) Would art (there will always be art) take all that gray into account? This makes readers think about familiar tropes in new ways.
Give Your Tropes an In-Story Reason to Exist
In Barbary Station, I gave my heroines good reasons to become space pirates: the economy is awful, traditional employment would mean having to live apart from each other, and piracy is where the real money lies. Justifying tropes in your story's universe makes them more meaningful, and they'll feel more real. People won't have read the trope written like that before, which is a good reason to freshen up old tropes.
