[KaoruAoiShiho]

Just spend a week on tvtropes.org and you'll instantly become a better writer I think.

It's not to say that tropes are bad but it's important to use it as a repository of easily accessible writing mistakes so you can quickly learn from the past and contextualize them for your own synthesis.

[ALittleLight]

I don't think tropes are mistakes. In fact, looking at tvtropes you see lots of examples from the most popular and successful movies, TV shows, books, etc.

If you're a writer you should be trying to say something new, but you shouldn't try to make everything new. People would be confused and put off by something that was violating and subverting every trope in fiction, but they would be amused by something that subverts one or two tropes in an interesting way. And subversion isn't even necessary to be good fiction, you could imagine a well executed work that isn't pioneering, but is still quite satisfying.

[tehf0x]

There's a trope for that! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/TropesA...

[messe]

> Just spend a week on tvtropes.org and you'll instantly become a better writer I think.

Maybe, but from my experience I find the more time I spend on browsing through tvtropes in a certain week, the more I overthink my writing and get absolutely fuck all done.

Don't get me wrong, it's worthwhile to understand tropes, but its not going to make you a better writer instantly. And repeated exposure to an attention-sucking site like tv-tropes doesn't help. It'll maybe make you a slower more methodical writer, but that's not necessarily a good thing. You can always fix quite a bit in editing.

[derefr]

Don’t go there for the tropes; go there for the examples. Look up the things you’re thinking of doing, and then consume the media where people are saying that thing was done well. It’s like reading highly-cited journal papers, for fiction.

[dllthomas]

Just spend an hour on TV Tropes and you'll realize you spent a week on TV Tropes.

[paulmd]

is there a trope for this?

[krapp]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/TVTropesWi...

[katamarimambo]

tvtropes is fun, but it's the cultural analysis equivalent of overfitting a model.