: Re: How Many Tropes Are Allowed In a Short Story? I am trying to add some dramatic ‘zombie-virus’ suspense to a short-story about boy-meets-girl young love, which already has an unlikely (but

@Welton431

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Because there's no rule, no guideline, that can help explain this away. It's about knowing your core audience, and what they want. Let me explain.

If you go on YouTube, and you look at "tropes I hate" or "cliches I hate" videos, you'll get some trends. But you need to understand that really, they're talking about tropes/cliches that are either overused, or poorly used.

No one has ever read a well-written story and said, "You used too many tropes, mate." Ever.

Tropes are nothing more than literary shortcuts, used for saving time or because they resonate with the intended core audience. If, for example, you are writing a romance for women between 28 and 40, you're going to have a boatload of cliches you cannot leave out.

It doesn't matter the length of it, simply because the point of a story is to make the core audience happy with it. If you can write it well with no tropes (and I really can't imagine a means of doing just that, given the staggering amounts of tropes out there), then good on you. If you use nothing but tropes every other sentence, that's fine too.

What you should instead focus on is who wants to read this (who are you writing for) and what do they expect. Then you decide if you want to consciously go with that, or go against it (within the confines of guidelines from whichever medium you publish with/via).

Just go on tvtropes (I refuse to put a link, because I'm not going to take responsibility for anyone who loses a months of their lives going back into that addictive pit of tropes), and you'll see the sheer scope of what constitutes a trope. So you can hardly go more than five words without invoking at least one.

(Specifically, you aren't talking about tropes, but about theme and setting. Zombie apocalypse, love, and life versus death. And really, those three things are common for this type of story. What you need to focus on is making it feel real enough to encourage immersion and the suspension of disbelief, because vampires and zombies aren't real, but people enjoy writing about them and reading about them all the same.)

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