Why Rowling Rocked the Briefcase Mix-up and How You can Rock Your Own Tired Tropes

Note: Don't forget to enter my Christmas/Blog Birthday giveaway, where you can win Newt's Hufflepuff scarf, a Sherlock mug, or the Emotion Thesaurus. 

If you saw Fantastic Beasts and you were like me and probably 95% of the audience, you knew the moment you saw Jacob's briefcase that it was going to be mixed up with Newt's. Similar things have happened in dozens if not hundreds of stories--usually in film and television. It's a trope, one used so many times in such identical ways, it feels cliche.

But as I mentioned in my post Using Cliches in Your Writing: Why, When, and How, there are three ways to get away with pulling off a cliche: personalize it, put a fresh spin on it, or use it to draw your audience into a surprise.

Another way that overlaps with these is to change the temporal (meaning timing) of the trope. Rowling may have used this trope, but she understood she was using it, and decided to take advantage of that to tease her audience. (She makes a point to do that every once in a while, if you haven't noticed.) So she has Jacob run into Newt, both dropping their suitcases. This is the traditionally prime moment to have the whole mix-up happen. This is where it happens in almost all films and television shows. Rowling knows this. So she teased us with it.

Read More

The "Twins as Clones" Writing Epidemic

Let's be honest, people are naturally interested in twins and multiples. When my sister had twins, she could never make it through the grocery store without people stopping and talking to her about twins in general and twins they know. Conversations became something like this (newsletter subscribers, sorry, but you have to see the video off my blog):



But while we may find twins and multiples fascinating, it's important to remember they are each distinct human beings. Why this is so hard to grasp, I don't know, but for some reason this reality rarely ever makes it into the storytelling world. Instead, most writers I know opt-in for the "Twins as Clones" approach, where they are essentially the same person in each body. You could pretty much merge the two characters into one and nothing would change. Nothing would really change in the character, and more often than not, nothing would change in the story. The twins are like one person in two bodies. Heck, even Lyra and her daemon Pantlaimon are more different from each other, and they are one person in two bodies.

I think one reason writers make twins into clones is because they've seen it done this way, and it's been done so many times that it's cliche, and of course, cliches are the first things that come into our minds when we brainstorm. I also think it happens because writers sit down and say, "I'm going to have twins in my story," and they create the characters "together" instead of as individual people. (More on that later.)

Read More

Using Cliches in Your Writing: Why, When, and How

Read More