Enjoy NYC Chris, it's a great town, and watch out for bedbugs, 90% of the Manhattan hotels have them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris_Morey
There's not that many tropes in The Stand and the ones that are there are largely character based. You do realize we all have our own personal tropes right?
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While
Tropes are not cliche's that doesn't mean that it's always the best idea to reach for a magical blackman.
I can definitely identify recurring tropes and themes in my own work, most if not all writers have a great deal of unity between works, and some tend to just retell the same story over and over again, and this isn't always bad.
The problem with King's use of these tropes and Cliche's is that they aren't particularly well-developed (at least in my experience). When I was reading Cell I noticed that the main character's profession (comic-book artist) was horribly underdeveloped (If you read my previous complaint, I really harped on the fact that he had simply bought his son a
Spiderman comic, not
The Spectacular Spider-man, or The Amazing Spiderman, or
Holy Shit! It's Spiderman just
spiderman.
That's lazy, a character who works in comics is going to have a passion FOR comics, just as I have a work in theatre, I have a passion for theatre. If I wrote a play where a character is an actor, I'm not just going to say "He was in the Merchant of Venice" I'm going to say something like "X played Shylock in a Dinner theater adaptation of the Merchant of Venice, it was billed as a
Moft Excellent Time but this was largely lost on the legions of senior citizens who thought it was a typo and overall, were more interested in their fried-chicken and comparing X to Al Pachino, who had done the role to some acclaim in Central Park the summer before..."
The use of Tropes in and of themselves is not bad, but you have to REALLY be good to pull off some discredited/cliche'd tropes (like the afore-mentioned magical negro) to any sort of success.