It's All Been Done

We all appreciate the known and sometimes we crave it.  But on occasion, it feels like Bare Naked Ladies is singing 'It's All Been Done' in the backs of our heads. 

Recently, I was reading a cozy mystery and as I was reading along, it seemed like I was reading the same book I'd read a dozen times with the characters and setting slightly changed.  You know the book...  'amateur detective with a failed marriage comes home to start a new life, finds a body, meets an old love who happens to be a cop who doesn't want her involved in the mystery, but she keeps solving it while battling the bitch from high school'.  It did, of course, differentiate itself eventually, but it felt all 'it's all been done' for a while there.

It's the same with romance.  If you read enough romances, over the course of time, you will see that they're pretty much the same.  I mean, at the basic level, of course they are - boy meets girl, they start to fall in love, tension happens to screw it up but they work it out, boy gets girl.  And that's what we want in our romance.  But when you look at the differences in how to pull that off, you could probably find a slew of them with the above mystery premise slightly changed: 'woman/man with a failed marriage comes home to start a new life, meets an old love while battling the bitch/bastard from high school'

Sometimes that's a good thing.  Other times?  :yawn:

And SF is the same way.  I know of several 'estranged from their family, heroine/hero goes out into the universe to seek their fortune and kick alien ass' series out there.

I guess what I'm talking about are 'tropes'.  Wikipedia gives this description: "The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works."  Like the 'secret baby' one in romance.  (He and She get together, she gets pregnant and for some reason or other hides it from him until sometime in the future when they reconnect and he discovers he's a daddy.)

Like I said, sometimes tropes are a good thing.  Readers want the known.  They just don't want too much of it.

Thinking about this yesterday morning, I discovered I have a recurring theme in my books - a lot of my heroines/heroes have bad family things in their backgrounds.  I mean, Jo in the genie books is probably the queen of that - both daddy and mommy issues there - but Jace lost her family to a fire and Ned's family hated that he's a Fed.  Mary's a foundling.  Rue's dad pretty much tortured her.  Jeni's mom is a total bitch.  And let's not even talk about Dennis' sister.  Not sure why I lean that way - it doesn't reflect my own family in any way.  Maybe it just makes for a certain pressure-laden background that produces diamonds and heroes.  I should probably fix that in my next new MCs' backgrounds.

And that's what the point is.  Finding a way to make the tropes just a little bit different, so readers aren't feeling like they've read the book before.  I almost DNF'd the mystery I talk about up there.  Which would've been a shame.  It was fun.  And I've said this before - don't give a reader a reason to stop reading your books.  

The above book added in some things that weren't present in other books of the same trope.  She made it interesting.  The only problem was she threw all the same-same stuff at me right up front.  

And I talked about this the other day - with Oliver now Kazimir - and the sameness I was feeling from reading other paranormal mysteries.  Look for sameness in your writing and try to winnow it out.  

Remember when vampires were all the rage - the Anne Rice Syndrome, if you will.  I can't bring myself to read a paranormal with vampires anymore.  It's all been done.  (If you know of one that's different, let me know.  I still like the idea, I'm just bored with the execution.) 

Of course, you can't help but ascribe to the sameness of your genre, but you can find ways to stand out from the crowd.  You have to if you want to grab a piece of the market share.