Here's a fun thing I love doing with cliches and stereotypes: GUT THEM! And then rearrange them to see if I can turn them into a story premise.
For example, a mafia boss abducts a pretty young girl, locks her up, and treats her like shit, but they have great sex (read: he has a big dick and an above-average technique), and she falls in love with him. Yadda yadda yadda.
I'm mightly annoyed by the tropes of sexed-up, romanticized abusive relationship fiction, so on the way to the loo, I thought, "What if a middle-aged, retiring Swedish assassin accidentally abducts a demon? What if by beheading him, she accidentally binds him to her and he's mightly pissed but can't take revenge because the binding prevents him from murdering her in the most bloodthirsty way he can think of? And that dude can think of maaaany ways to disassemble a human body and squeeze all the juices out.
Yes, of course, the two main characters are already alive, and a first draft of the first few chapters is already written. I'm going to share it here soon-ish (can't quite decide whether to share it before or after Peregrine is finished).
What tropes do you hate in fiction? What cliches make you cringe? How would you gut them and rearrange them to tell a very different story?
Until next time,
