Tropes, Clichés, and Conventions, Oh, My! A Writer’s Guide to Genre Expectations and Fresh Storytelling

Use Genre Conventions with Purpose—and Keep Your Storytelling Fresh

Want your story to feel like a comfortable old jacket to readers without ever feeling like they've read it before?

What You'll Learn

• How to tell the difference between trope, cliché, and convention—and why getting those terms confused causes problems on the page
• Techniques for using familiar tropes as a framework while keeping the story unique to you, drawn from literary agent Jessica Berg's "unique but universal" standard
• How to align your structure with reader expectations using four proven story shapes: Kurt Vonnegut's boy-gets-girl arc, Algis Budrys's "Keep the Crisis Coming" model, the hero's journey, and my own plotting roadmap
• Strategies for describing characters with a single telling detail instead of paragraphs of physical description—and when an aspirational cover photo is the right exception
• Methods for writing physiological reactions—fear, anger, anxiety—without falling back on the racing pulse, tightening chest, or freeze every other novel uses
• Guidelines for auditing your manuscript for filler words—"really," "very," "pretty," "for sure," "the fact is"—and replacing flat adverb-plus-verb pairings with precise verbs that carry meaning
• How to take a trope that has tipped into cliché and refresh it by going specific, with a worked example built around a once-radical theme that now feels dated

Through this comprehensive approach, you'll move from treating tropes as something to avoid to seeing them as a foundation you can build on with confidence. I work through the definitions first—because the confusion between trope, cliché, and convention causes real problems in the writing process and in the reader's mind—and then I show how that distinction plays out at every scale of the manuscript. We look at the big picture (story shape and genre expectations), the middle picture (character description and reader perception), and the small picture (word choice at the sentence level). Along the way, I share what literary agents are actually looking for, what current screenwriters say about working with recycled tropes, and how to make sure your own voice comes through even when you're using a familiar framework.

Perfect for:

• Writers who have been told their work feels predictable and aren't sure how to fix it without abandoning the framework that's working
• Authors working in a defined genre who want to meet reader expectations without writing to formula
• Novelists in revision who want a checklist for cliché at the structural, scene, and sentence level
• Anyone curious about why some old tropes still land and others feel dated—and how to tell the difference in your own work

This workshop equips you with tools that work at every level of your manuscript, from the overall shape of your story down to the verbs you choose. The structure models apply across mystery, romance, fantasy, thriller, literary, and historical fiction. The description and word-level guidance carries over to short fiction as easily as to novels. And the framework for refreshing a tired trope works whether you're starting a new project or auditing a finished draft.

Whether you're writing your first novel or your fifteenth, this session will change how you think about the conventions of your genre. I want you to stop reinventing the wheel and start using familiar frameworks the way professional writers do—as a foundation that frees you to do your most original work on the details that matter most.

Tropes are not the enemy. Used well, they help you meet your readers where they are and then take them somewhere they didn't expect to go. Rent the replay to get my full guidance on each of these techniques—including a live Q&A where I answer questions on layering multiple tropes in a single book, writing series that move beyond their opening hook, describing characters in fantasy and romance where physical detail is part of the convention, and finding fresh ways to render emotion without the racing-pulse shortcut.