: Re: Is it possible to combine clichés/tropes to make it not a cliché? I have read a couple romance books at most and so don’t claim to have very much experience with romance and clichés.

@Lengel543

Short answer: yes. If something feels clichéd, and you don't like that, one way to freshen it up is to throw another trope or cliché into the mix. You can think of this as an exercise in lateral thinking, a way to challenge your brain into coming up with creative ideas.

For instance, if you combine a love triangle with the initial animosity (your first two ideas) the challenge becomes to write the classic animosity-to-love story, but in two ways in parallel: two men in love with the same woman and hating each other, should now start out as two male friends feeling animosity for the same woman, and then slowly discovering their feelings for the woman (in parallel), as their friendship disintegrates.

The main thing to focus on is to follow through the consqeuqnces. Don't just add a meet-cute to a pre-exisiting relationship, and interlace the two stories. That makes your story more clichéd, not less. Figure out how one cliché forces you to change the conventions of the other.

Some more generally applicable tricks to freshen up a stale or clichéd story (sticking with romance as a genre):


Swap the genders Take a meet-cute with a clutzy woman and a confident man and flip it around. Since romance is particularly driven by gender-based clichés, this is a very cheap and effective way to inject some novelty.
Homosexuality Purely from a structural point of view, adding a gay character gives you a whole new range of ways to structure relationships. For instance, you can set up a love triangle where everybody loves each other, and nobody gets what they want. Even taking an existing trope, and playing it straight with gay characters totally changes the dynamics, and lets you write a fresh story.
Combining with conventions of other genre fiction Romance in space, romance on a pirate ship, romance in a cut-throat business environment, romance and zombies, romance and detective fiction. The more preposterous the combination seems, the more likely it is to tickle your creativity.
Non-linear story telling Take a straightforward romance story and tell it backwards (this makes a happy romance a tragedy and a tragic romance a bittersweet story). Or start in the middle and combine the rise of the courtship in flashback with the coming apart of the relationship in real time.
Deconstruction Take the most overplayed and unrealistic story you can think of, and deconstruct the tropes. Play them out as they would happen in real life, and then find a way to inject a more truthful level of romance, without letting go of the wish-fulfilment that makes romance fun. Batman Begins did this very effectively for the superhero origin story. They did everything they could to make a preposterous story more realistic, by letting all the parts of the story fit each other more logically. And the one ridiculous thing that they couldn't get rid of or make more realistic (millionaire decides to dress up as bat), they put at the very heart of the main character (his own fear of bats indirectly causes his worst trauma).


And again, this only works if you follow through the consequences. If you just swap the genders and play everything else out as though you hadn't, the story is still clichéd. You need to think though how the genderswap changes things, where it sends the traditional story off the rails, and how to maintain what it was that made the original work well in the first place.

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