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Just to clear up any confusion right off the bat, bunnies are the worst! Sure they may look cute, hopping around with their cotton tails and twitchy noses, but it’s all a trick. They will destroy your grass by eating it down to the roots and by peeing and pooping on it like mad-which also kills the grass. They will also gnaw off the bark of your fruit trees, which is not good for them at all, and those freaky jackrabbits’ giant creepy teeth, I’m pretty sure, could chew through your ankle if it got the chance.
Bunnies are NOT cool.
And, neither are overused genre tropes.
What is a trope?
A trope is a familiar and repeated (aka overused) symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing (anything) that is spread throughout a particular genre.
The problem with tropes is not necessarily that it kills your story, like bunnies will do to your lawn, but they have the potential to kill your readers’ interest in your story.
How?
When a reader picks up a book and sees the same types of characters, the same pattern behind a storyline, the same hints that his 16-year-old nobody is destined to save anything and everything by discovering their deeply buried inner strength/power/importance/etc., they start to see how the story is going to end, because well…they’ve read it before. Maybe the names have changed, or the setting, or the mythology, or whatever, but if the overall concept is something every other genre writer is using, readers are going to pick up on that.
Is that to say you can’t ever write using some of these tropes?
Of course not. The key is to use them in their barest form. Strip them down to the essence of what makes readers connect with the trope to begin with, and add from there.
Weak, friendless, unimportant teen becomes the hero? Check. We’ve all been there, so we identify with those emotions and frustrations, and especially the hope for something more.
Self-conscious, doesn’t understand her own worth heroine who thinks she’ll never find love. Again, check. Everyone has those moments of thinking they aren’t good enough to find their happily ever after.
The problem with tropes isn’t that they exist and are used. The problem arises when writers stop there, and don’t expand, delve deeper, experiment, make it unique.
If your male lead has commitment issues, give him a REAL reason for his fears or avoidance. Being too awesome to be tied down isn’t going to cut it in most cases.
Your teen hero is going to save the world? Fabulous, but make him or her take a different path to get there than the typical camp/school/mentor/etc.
What new, exciting, difficult, gut-wrenching ways can your characters develop into their final self? It doesn’t have to be so complicated that solving the prime number equation looks easy, but it does need to be unique to your story, character, and plot.
Working with teen writers over the summer, most start out with fan fiction. It’s a great place to start, because a lot of the difficult world and character development is done for them and they can focus on the story and figuring out their style. It’s a great learning experience, and it’s okay that their stories often end up being a mishmash of all their favorite books, because they’re working on their craft.
However, as that writing skill develops, we need to move away from well-worn tropes and begin experimenting with new, fresh concepts that will take a story from something frustratingly familiar to one that stands out from all the others.
So, don’t let the bunnies destroy your grass, and don’t let your story get passed over because it’s just more of the same.
It’s taken me a long, long time to finally get around to cleaning this book up and putting it out there, but Memory’s Edge is finally up for pre-order and will release on Kindle and #KindleUnlimited on August 21st!
Now that my kids are getting older, children’s museums offer less and less. Their interest in playing with bubbles or making paperclip helicopters has waned. At almost-ten and thirteen, they want something in between appreciating modern art and crawling through the “pretend you’re a bug” exhibit. They want exciting, yet interesting.
If you’re planning at trip to Mesa Verde National Park and hoping to explore the Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling, one of the largest and most popular cliff dwelling sites at the park, you’ll be limited to viewing it from a distance. Why? While we want all our visitors to experience the cliff dwellings, keeping guests safe is our top priority. Recent rock falls at the Spruce Tree House site prompted the decision to close it to the public for the first time in 50 years. 
That covering worked for two decades, but in 1960, a 10-ton rock fell from the south end of the cliff overhang, hitting the nearby public trail and part of the Spruce Tree House site. Trained climbers pulled down a loose, five-ton rock in danger of falling to prevent it from doing more damage, and cleanup began. The previous covering put over the crack was removed and replaced with an anchoring system that would hopefully prevent the cracks from widening. These 42 anchors, up to 16 feet long, were drilled into the cliff face to anchor the arches in place, then the crack was filled with gravel and cement. This system held for many years, until recently. 
While flying does cut down your travel time, it also leaves you without a car. That’s not so bad when visiting New Orleans and staying at a hotel right in the French Quarter…mostly. While my husband was sitting through an EPA conference, my two kids and I walked all over the French Quarter, seeing the aquarium, kids museum, cemeteries, the double decker tour buses, and the butterfly habitat.
For some reason, rather than just having the nice man at the hotel call us a cab, I thought we could make it to the zoo using NOLA’s public transit system. I had several maps which laid out the route to the zoo through various modes of transportation. It would be an adventure, right?
They nicely pointed out where we should be standing. A platform in the middle of the road. The streetcar lines literally ran down the middle of the street, with cars driving on either side. Beginning to regret this adventure, we trekked safely to the streetcar stop, only to be followed by yelling. I looked around, hoping the shrieking isn’t directed at us, and found the nice lady who’d directed us yelling and waving at us. I was so startled, it took me a few minutes to figure out what she was trying to tell me.
Because the streetcars run on rails, they run in one direction. What direction you want to go determines was side of the tracks you should wait on. We were on the wrong side. So, grabbing my kids’ hands again, we hurried across the rails to the other side of the middle of the street, and waited at the right stop.
Seeing that I had two kids with me, the other tourists were extremely kind and let us get on with the first group. Ten minutes later, we finally made it to the zoo, and it was as fabulous as I’d been told. One of the best zoos I’ve visited. The only thing that wasn’t awesome was the fact that we had still had to get back to the hotel.
Originally, I intended to get my bachelor’s degree in English, but there were some issues with that plan and now I’m working on a degree in Communication-Media Studies with a minor in English. Getting my degree will allow me to teach more classes at our local community college, so here I go!
You’re not the only one who makes mistakes. We all do. While I was on a panel at Denver Comic Con last year, we were all asked what was the biggest mistake we ever made in a book. Jim Butcher was on that panel as well (which was seriously the highlight of that entire weekend!) and he said when writing the early Dresden Files books, he didn’t have the income to visit Chicago, where the books are set, and wrote a scene with characters meeting in the parking lot of the baseball stadium. Problem was, that stadium was built before the majority of people had cars. Hence: it has no parking lot.
USA Today Bestselling Author DelSheree Spinner 