Writers in the Storm

by Janice Hardy

When familiar becomes forgettable, it’s time to shake things up.

My husband and I recently watched a movie that was well done, but still fell flat, because it didn’t offer anything we hadn’t seen dozens of times before. We could pretty much describe how the entire movie was going to unfold based on the first few scenes, and it unfolded exactly as we expected. That made it really hard to care about the characters or the plot.

Same tropes, same character archetypes, same basic story.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as readers love the tropes that speak to them. I can’t get enough of underdog sports movies, even though they’re pretty much the same movie every time. The entire romance genre is built on stories that appeal to beloved tropes, and readers pick up a book because it has the tropes they’re looking for.

The trouble starts when “expected” slips into “predictable.”

Tropes are a natural part of writing. Every genre has them, every reader expects certain ones, and they help define a particular type of story. But when we rely too much on them, or fail to do anything new with them, they become predictable.

And predictable is deadly to stories.

When a reader can see what’s coming long before it happens and there’s nothing in place to make them anticipate that moment, the moment will have little to no impact when it arrives.

What You Can Do to Liven Up Your Tropes

The trick to avoiding “been-there/done-that” tropes is to offer something new or surprising to the reader.

1. Do what readers don’t expect

The good thing about tropes? You usually know what they are for your genre, which makes them easier to turn on their heads. If a scene or plot point starts to feel predictable, look for ways to not do what you originally planned.

• Go ahead and write that adorable meet-cute in a coffee shop, but then surprise readers by making the sweet barista who witnesses it be the actual love interest.
• Let the heroes split up to search for the killer, but doing so lets them flank the bad guy instead of being picked off one by one.
• Give your Chosen One a feeling they were special all along, but show they have the skills and ambition to deal with the prophecy.

Brainstorm what your readers will expect, and then look for ways to satisfy that expectation from a different angle or new perspective. Sometimes all it takes is tweaking the motivation or letting a minor character make the move readers assume the protagonist will make. By nudging the story a degree or two off the expected path, you can create fresh character choices and more intriguing outcomes.

2. Have the trope fail (or succeed).

It’s usually a shock when readers expect a win and the hero loses (and vice versa). While you don’t want to do it just for shock value, a loss (or win) at the worst time can shake things up in unexpected ways.

Take a clue from Deep Blue Sea and have that shark eat Samuel L. Jackson during his inspirational speech. Or follow Game of Thrones and behead the character everybody thought was the protagonist.

• The obvious escape is the hero sneaking out through a bathroom window? Brick up that window.
• The heroes suddenly remember an old piece of equipment or weapon left forgotten? Yeah, make it not work after all.
• That complete makeover the heroine goes through? The love interest is turned off by the new look and attitude that goes with it.

If you find yourself using a common trope in the way it’s always been used, brainstorm what would happen if the opposite effect occurred instead. How would that reversal ripple through the story? Would it force characters to make harder decisions? Create more tension? Reveal deeper emotional truths? A single unexpected outcome can reset the stakes and change how readers see the story.

3. Do the expected, but not where it’s expected.

Sometimes seeing something familiar in an unexpected place is enough to spice it up. The monster you find in your bathroom is much scarier than the one you stumble across in the dark woods.

• Maybe the lovebirds meet in a place neither one of them would ever want to admit to later.
• Or the monster decides to attack the bright sunny hotel room before the heroes get a chance to go after it.
• Perhaps the evil wizard bent on enslaving the world is confronted in a cute two-bedroom cottage surrounded by flowers.

If crawling through air ducts to escape is a common trope in your genre, find a fresh, new way for your hero to make it to safety. Moving a trope to a different setting can shift the tone, the emotional stakes, and even the pacing of a scene. A moment that feels both familiar and surprising is a powerful combination that can keep readers guessing.

4. Borrow tropes from other genres.

Just because a trope is a little tired in one genre, doesn’t mean it can’t work wonders in a different genre. You’d hardly expect a “dark figure behind the shower curtain” moment in a romance, but what if that’s how your lovely couple meet? A different-genre trope brings its own set of emotions and expectations you could have fun playing with.

• Maybe the heroine and her friend “split up” while shopping, and she runs into the antagonist and bad things happen.
• A false scare in a horror novel could really be a meet-cute with the love interest for a subplot.
• Have the Chosen One die in the first few chapters as an unexpected sacrifice.

Mix it up and see what tropes might work in unexpected ways in your genre. An old trope from another genre feels fresh if your readers don’t read that genre. You might even discover new tonal layers, such as humor, tension, mystery, or romance, simply by letting a borrowed trope bring its emotional baggage into your world.

5. Consider what happens if you eliminate all the genre’s tropes.

This one’s a bit extreme, but what happens if you cut every common trope from your story? What new possibilities do you see?

• The Chosen One becomes a gal who happened to be nearby when crap went down and she stepped in to help.
• The two lovebirds have worked together for a long time, but sparks fly as they work on a strange project together.
• The campers at the haunted lake stay together and craft a smart, safe, well-considered plan of attack, but the bad guy is just smarter.

Looking beyond the obvious outcomes can reveal fresh and original scenes. Removing the “safety net” of familiar ideas forces you to explore your story’s unique conflicts and turning points that emerge naturally from your characters, not the tropes surrounding them. Even if you put some tropes back in later, it’ll be because they work for your story, not just any story in your genre.

Tropes can be comforting, but they can also cause a great story to sleepwalk its way through the novel.

Sure, the pieces are there, but without surprises or fresh angles, readers will forget the book minutes after finishing it. Strive for the unexpected, and your readers will remember your story long after the final page.

EXERCISE FOR YOU:

Pick one trope you know appears in your story. Now write down:

• The expected version of that trope.
• The opposite version of that trope.
• A sideways version—something surprising that isn’t opposite, just different.

Compare all three and consider how they change your story. Which one would make it stronger, more surprising, or more compelling?

What tropes do you rely on? What’s your least-favorite trope? What about your favorite trope? Please share it with us down in the comments! (Janice is available for your questions as well.)

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. and the chapter books Who's Haunting Who? and The Haunting of Cabin 13 for Lerner Publishing. For adults, she writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she's not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series. Sign up for her newsletter and receive 25 ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now free.

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by James R. Preston

Nature tends toward disorganization. Entropy. Entropy rules the universe, and it lurks out there, waiting for your files. Bad things can happen to your files. As W. B. Yeats observed “Things fall apart.”, and it is your duty to guard the worlds and the people you have created. 

Never clean out your filing cabinets— you don’t know what might be in there.

I speak from experience.

Recently I ventured into the dark, musty recesses of a steel box full of old writing and found a review I’d written of Stephen King’s The Stand in its original truncated version, and, never one to pass up a chance to stop work, I stuffed folders back into the box and started reading.

Now for a commercial: Why you should read this essay.

I know what you’re thinking, “An essay about managing my files, electronic and paper? Maybe I’ll go floss my teeth.”

I did not design this essay, it came to me. And it was like the road described by Bilbo Baggins: it leads on and on and began to assume greater significance until I realized. . .

The 5 rules below are more important than just files.

They lead to larger topics that can influence your whole writing effort. Thinking about files will be like that road: it will open up an important part of your writing life.

So, let’s “ease on down that road.”

1. Save files, but be careful!

Technology has enabled us to save as many copies of our work as we want, but that’s a double-edged sword. You need to keep track of which iteration is the most recent and you need to decide what to save. Just the most recent draft? A separate doc for notes, probably. Links to sources, absolutely. You need to know where your information comes from. This leads to the next rule. 

2. Shirley, Shirley Bo-Birley.

You’ve got to play The Name Game, and that means you make up the rules. Even if you have a big-time publisher, it’s up to you to keep track, if only for your own peace of mind, of of the most up-to-date version. There’s another reason that involves a true-life adventure of mine that I’ll share later. 

Helpful Tips:

• Be consistent. If you reduce a title to initials, stick with it. For example The Andromeda Strain might reduce to TAS followed by the date. 
• Be aware that you will have different iterations of the ms. While “Save As” is your friend, plan from the beginning how you want to differentiate those iterations and incorporate that scheme into the document title. 
• Be suspenders and belt. Not only do you want to back up in multiple places, you want to write that naming plan down and keep it handy. It is all too easy to get lost in a maze of files, folders, and sub folders.

3. Check your backup copies.

If they are electronic do a Restore every now and then to make sure they’re good. One of my employers stored all their data on a set of seven magnetic tapes, carefully removing the backup tape at the end of the day and rotating in the next in line.

The system crashed and, when they opened it up, the most recent backup was bad, and the one after that. The problem had propagated through all seven tapes.

The moral: check those backups! Boot them up every now and then just to be sure.

4. Consider storing a backup set offsite, or in the cloud.

If you have a fire you want to save your pets, not your PC.

5. Avoid scribbling notes on scraps of paper — unless you have to.

This rule requires a bit of elucidation.

If you are like me when you are drafting a new work you carry it around with you in your head, day and night. When the Dave Clark 5 sang about “Bits and Pieces” they were referring to love and in many ways when you’re deep into a story, that’s what it’s like.

You’re in love with the story and you carry it with you constantly, but it’s not always possible to stop and work on your draft.

True Story:

Some time ago I was awarded my employer’s seats at the symphony and whipping out a cell phone during the performance is a definite no-no. But I was able to discreetly scribble notes on the program.

Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of sitting at a keyboard.

Part Two of this rule says you must transfer those notes to a more permanent home the moment you get a chance. I have that symphony program, but only as a souvenir. I sat up after we got home to keystroke them. 

How do these rules connect to a larger world?

And now we have followed the path of file safety and come to the point I promised, where it all connects.

Those words on paper, electronic or physical, represent your best efforts to bring a new world and new people to life. You owe it to them, and to yourself, to safeguard their existence. Entropy is out there, disorganization and pure misfortune lurk everywhere; it is the rule, not the exception. Things fall apart.

A couple of examples.

Dune 7

The new Dune books that carry on the famous story of Paul Maud’dib, his mother Jessica, and the sand worms almost didn’t exist. After his death, Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, found a key in his belongings and tracked it to a safe deposit box. In the box he found several of the large 7” floppy discs along with notes for “Dune 7.”

No one knew about the notes, discs, or the book they described. As a side note, there could be another rule about making sure the files you have so faithfully saved are in a readable format. Software makers — Microsoft is notorious for this— love to push out updates.

This Dune 7 story is pretty well-known, but in researching the background for this essay I discovered some Internet folks who doubt it.

So here’s my bit. 

Years before his death, I got to sit and talk to Frank Herbert after a lecture. It was a fascinating conversation and he was very gracious to a beginning writer. (Analog had just published my first story and was looking at the sequel.)

He was clear that the Dune books would continue. Years later I got to talk with Brian Herbert, his son, who confirmed the story. 

One more, and I love this one because it’s about paper.

Paris in the 20th Century

Verne, author of iconic stories like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, has one more novel that you may never have heard of. Decades after his death a safe was drilled open because the combination was lost, and in it was Paris in the 20th Century, Verne’s first novel. Over a hundred years later his great-grandson found the manuscript in a safe. 

And in the End

I started down this road because I needed to go through my files. For those of you thinking “My publisher will take care of all of this” you may be right, unless . . . In July my publisher unexpectedly passed away. His small organization was thrown into disarray. I’ve got other writers asking me what to do, asking about their missing files.

“Ars longa, vita brevis,” from Hippocrates. 

“Life is short, art eternal.” (If you kept copies of your files.)

About that review that sidelined my productivity. . .

I’m proud of it. At the end I pointed out that the novel was too short. Fortunately, in 1990 King published the complete novel. 

There’s another benefit even beyond the obvious one.

Caring for your precious files keeps you acquainted with them, it forces you to examine your work and spend a moment thinking, “Yeah, I wrote that and it’s not bad, not bad at all.”

And now it’s your turn. How do you label your electronic files? Do you store them in more than one location? How often do you back up? Do you have horror stories about lost files? Share with us how you keep track of the parts of your work.

Thanks for reading and being part of the WITS community! Now, get back to work. Type faster!

About James

James R. Preston is the author of the multiple-award-winning Surf City Mysteries. He is currently at work on the sixth, called Remains To Be Seen. His most recent works are Crashpad and Buzzkill, two historical novellas set in the 1960’s at Cal State Long Beach. Kirkus Reviews called Buzzkill “A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.” His books are collected as part of the California Detective Fiction collection at the University of California Berkeley. 

Find out more about James at his website.

Top photo purchased from Depositphotos.

By Jenn Windrow

When December rolls in, many of us find ourselves standing in front of a tree, ready to transform it from an ordinary object into something warm, bright, and full of meaning. It’s a small act of yearly magic, and, surprisingly, it mirrors one of the most transformative processes in writing.

Developmental editing.

Much like decorating a holiday tree, shaping a manuscript is not about adding more and more until the branches bow under the weight. It’s about choosing intentionally, trimming thoughtfully, and arranging elements so the whole structure feels harmonious and complete. If you’ve ever wondered whether your draft needs a festive “trim,” this season offers the perfect metaphor.

1. Start With the Structure: The Tree Trunk and Branches

Every beautiful tree begins with a solid structure. Before ornaments, tinsel, or lights come into play, the first question is simple: Is the tree stable? In developmental editing, this is your plot and narrative framework.

Ask yourself:

Are the major story beats in place?
Do the branches (subplots, supporting arcs) extend naturally from the trunk (central conflict)?
Does the overall shape convey symmetry, intention, and direction?

If the answer is “not quite,” resist the urge to decorate prematurely. No amount of glittery prose or clever dialogue can compensate for a wobbly trunk or lopsided shape. Straighten what leans. Reinforce what weakens. Remove the branches that are redundant, unhealthy, or distracting. A strong narrative structure, like a sturdy tree sets the tone for everything that comes next.

2. Trim the Excess: Clearing Cluttered Branches

Real trees often grow unevenly. Some branches jut out too far; others crowd together so tightly they obscure the natural shape. Manuscripts, too, accumulate clutter—scenes that don’t move the story forward, subplots that go nowhere, characters who don’t serve a function, and exposition that spools endlessly.

Clutter happens to every writer. But revision is the season of intentional trimming.

Ask yourself:

• Does this scene reveal character, advance plot, or deepen theme?
• Is this subplot meaningfully connected to the main arc?
• Would the story lose anything if this character disappeared?
• Is this passage explaining something the reader already senses?

If you hesitate, the branch probably needs trimming.

Remember: trimming doesn’t diminish your story. It reveals it. Just as cutting away dense, unnecessary branches uncovers the natural beauty of a tree, removing narrative clutter allows your core story to breathe. Your draft becomes clearer, sharper, and easier for readers to navigate.

3. Add Light with Tension and Pacing

Once the excess is gone, it’s time to string the lights. Those glowing lines of energy that guide the eye and create warmth. In a manuscript, these lights take the form of tension and pacing.

Lights don’t simply wrap a tree; they guide a rhythm, creating bright spots and soft shadows. In the same way, tension should ebb and flow through your narrative, offering contrast and momentum. Good pacing invites readers to lean in, follow the current, and stay connected.

Consider:

• Are there stretches where tension drops for too long?
• Do the emotional highs feel earned and well-spaced?
• Does the story’s rhythm encourage readers to turn pages?

String your “lights” with care. Too few and the story feels dim. Too many and it becomes overwhelming. Balance is the goal.

4. Choose the Right Ornaments: Highlighting Themes and Emotional Beats

Now comes the fun part: decoration. Ornaments aren’t random. They’re symbolic, personal, and chosen with purpose. In your manuscript, the “ornaments” are thematic elements, motifs, and emotional beats you want to emphasize.

Themes become the standout ornaments, those meaningful pieces that catch the light and resonate. Motifs act as repeating accents, giving unity and cohesion. Emotional beats are the sentimental pieces. The ones that make readers stop and feel something.

But be selective. Not every ornament deserves a place on every tree. Too many, and the shape gets lost. Too few, and the story feels flat.

Identify the moments and ideas that matter most:

• What emotional truths sit at the heart of this story?
• Which symbolic elements reinforce the characters’ journeys?
• Where can a motif subtly echo a theme without overwhelming the scene?

Place these narrative ornaments with intention, and your story will sparkle with clarity and resonance.

5. Step Back and Admire the Whole

Finally, once the tree is fully decorated, you step back. You squint a little. You tilt your head. You look at the whole picture.

Developmental editing requires this same distance.

Read through with fresh eyes, asking:

• Does everything feel balanced?
• Does each element contribute to a cohesive whole?
• Does the story glow with its intended emotional and thematic impact?

A manuscript that has been trimmed, lit, and ornamented with purpose becomes something special. A story that shines not because of excess, but because of thoughtfulness.

This December, Give Your Draft the Gift of Intention

Just as we decorate trees to bring warmth and meaning to a cold season, developmental editing transforms your manuscript into something vibrant, cohesive, and deeply felt. So, this year, when you find yourself trimming your tree, let it be a reminder that your draft deserves the same care, clarity, and celebration.

Happy revising and may your stories shine bright.

What part of your draft are you planning to “trim” this season?

About Jenn Windrow

Jenn Windrow once attempted to write a “normal” book—and promptly bored herself into a coma. So now she sticks to what she does best: writing snarky, kick-butt heroines, broody supernatural men, and more sexual tension than a vampire in a blood bank.

She’s the award-winning author of the Alexis Black novels and the Redeeming Cupid series, where the undead never sparkle and the drama is always delicious. Jenn moonlights as a developmental editor, helping other writers wrangle their wild plots and tangle-free prose.

When not arguing with her characters or muttering about Oxford commas, she can be found binge-watching trash TV, wrangling the slew of animals that live in her house (husband and teenagers included), or telling herself she’ll only have one more cookie.

You can find her at jennwindrow.com or lurking on social media where she pretends to be an extrovert.

Header image by Sabina Sturzu - Unsplash