Shoot The Hero: Writing Against Plot Tropes

Fairy tales are sweet as sugar. They reward heroic characters with happy endings and serve justice to evil. Good triumphs over bad, love prevail and every loose end is nicely resolved by The End. H.E.A warms our souls by saving us from reality. Yes, let’s read about the good fight while finding social harmony and love everlasting. It’s a gift wrapped in a pretty bow. They are the things that are hard to obtain in the real world. Give me a fairy tale so I can curl up and smile.

"Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult."
-Albert Camus

Dreams and fairy tales are fantastic but life itself has beautiful stories too. They lead us along peculiar paths that take us to worlds we wouldn’t expect to visit. Take the happy girl who, at the age of six, dreamed of mermaids and unicorns, was a studious university graduate at twenty, but at the age of thirty, struggled to keep her life together because one bad decision followed another. The desire to make everyone else happy and put herself last had ruined her. At fifty, she’s now alone, poor and abused by strangers. Or let’s talk about the popular guy who has wealth and good looks on his side but is being torn apart by poor mental health. Through no fault of his own, he has a mind cancer growing inside his head. It’s causing disturbing visions to appear. He’ll die crossing the street because he imagined it to be a flooded river with his mother trapped on the other side. Some will mistake his death for suicide. Both characters are heroes in their own right but neither of them will appear this way until the last second. These stories aren’t conventional fairy tales. Their endings won’t be conventionally happy either.

Burn those clichés!

I write adult stories that challenge readers to find their happy endings. Yes, they are there. All it needs is the wisdom of a reader’s life experiences (and a broad sense of mind) to bring them to the surface. Good AND evil will dwell inside a single character, not because there’s a supernatural influence acting upon them, but because the brutal knocks of life have altered their well-intended direction. If a good woman can allow herself to get abused by men and a good man can step in front of a truck, then we already know how easy it is for people to change from a set of factors that are beyond their control — and how wrong an observer can get it when looking in from the outside. It’s possible to merge evil and good — and a story’s conclusion won’t wrap up every loose end with a pretty resolution bow. Characters will get what they deserve and, often, far more than they expected, by The End.

There are no clichés here. I’ll shoot heroes if it’s necessary to do so. That is the true magic of adult storytelling. My Doomed Hero‘s story begins by downloading the book below. It’s free (for now). Get ready for a journey you won’t expect. Happy never after is just a click away.

-Michael