View source for Tropes Are Not Legos

{{Useful Notes}}{{Mechanics of Writing}}
[[File:Luke-or-harry.jpg|thumb|400px|link=Wrong Hands|What do you mean, "[[Star Wars|Luke]] or [[Harry Potter|Harry]]"? This list describes ''[[The Lord of the Rings|Frodo]]''!]]
{{quote|If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.|[[Douglas Adams]]|''The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time''}} 

One day, [[Frankenstein (novel)|Victor Frankenstein]] had an idea. What are humans, if not a collection of parts? So he took a smart brain from one place, a clean kidney from another, a strong leg from this graveyard, an perfect eye from that one... well, you get the idea. And then finally, he added the final ingredient, a little electric fluid to animate his creation. [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|This did not work out well.]]<ref>The Creature was not born evil in the novel; but it was considered ugly and monstrous by the people. If you're not careful, the same could apply to a work and its audience.</ref>

You should view tropes the same way. While they are certainly parts of great works of fiction, [[All The Tropes:Tropes Are Not Good|just using them does not make something great]]. You cannot decide to take plot tropes, setting tropes, and character tropes; connect them together; and expect the resulting story to be anything other than a [[Frankenstein's Monster|monster]]. Tropes are not [[LEGO]] blocks that can be simply thrown together to make an entertaining story. No matter how true you are to the tropes, you always need to give a story a soul.

Stories are ultimately about some [[Central Theme|underlying vision]]. Even starting with a complex plot trope like a [[Hero's Journey]], all it represents is an outline to be filled in. The author has a thousand choices to make<ref>... and a thousand more to make before the stars turn dim and cold</ref> about what a character would do, how to create a proper feel of a setting, which word choice conveys the best meaning, and so on. So while tropes can act as a starting point or an inspiration, the author's job is to further refine his story. [[Tropes Are Tools]] that serve the story, and [[Tropes Are Flexible]] enough to let you look at an old idea in a new light. Tropes are not what bring a story to life -- that's all the job of the [[creators]].

None of this is to say that you should avoid tropes in creative writing. [[Tropes Are Not Bad]]. [[Genre]]s are nothing more than standard collections of tropes, or "genre conventions". No one complains that we shouldn't have genres. But tropes should not be attached [[Enforced Trope|solely]] because they're a [[Genre Convention]] either, even by [[Executive Meddling]]. Everything should serve the greater story; if it doesn't, the advice is ''always'' to [[Murder Your Darlings]]. 

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[[Category:Mechanics of Writing]]
[[Category:Pages Original to All The Tropes]]
[[Category:Trope Tropes]]