Mirror, mirror – clichés, tropes, or indispensable aids?

Ever have one of those days when a single thing jumps out at you wherever you turn? It happens, of course, when you’re already attuned to a topic. One day I was writing about a person who walked with a cane – which I’d never thought about before – unleashed armies of people everywhere I turned, all walking with canes! And this wasn’t even in a hospital or nursing home.

I had a similar experience this weekend when, after a marvelous workshop about writerly revision, including the dreaded topic of clichés (hint: avoid them like the plague) I walked into a discussion at the Dallas Book Festival about tropes.

What’s the connection between clichés and tropes? Both are shorthand ways of conveying information without needing to spell out all the details (a definition cribbed from one of my recently-favorite sites, TV Tropes, which I wrote about earlier this year in "How does a writer juggle a cast of multiples."

image: pixabay

As A. Lee Martinez, a writer on the festival’s trope panel put it, “even good writers have techniques to tell the story,” without reinventing language from scratch.   

Whether we call them story structures, or archetypes, or elements, some genres require tropes. Mess with expected tropes too much, and readers will throw down the story in puzzlement, if not outright disgust. The happily ever after (or at least, happily for now) endings that are de rigueur for romances are familiar tropes. 

(Writing a romantic relationship that doesn’t end happily? Call it, as another panelist suggested, “women’s fiction” instead. Different genre, different trope.) 

Clichés only become clichéd when their descriptions are so apt that they become too familiar and lose their freshness. Not to mention become disease-ridden, somewhat in the manner of red-tip photinias in landscape plantings. Their original virtues of striking aptness and novelty contain the seeds of their ruin. (Obviously, this whole topic has infected my writing!)

And although tropes are useful because of their familiarity, as panel moderator Stacey Kuhnz pointed out, “at some point, tropes need to be a little bit different,” or risk becoming clichés themselves.

I nodded sagely, only to fear as I was revising a manuscript later that I had also fallen victim to a particularly dreaded cliché/trope -- the mirror image description.

Decades ago, when omniscient narrators were in style, writers had no qualms about flat-out telling readers what their story characters looked like. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell could tell us directly that her heroine Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but she had green eyes and black hair and the fair Irish skin that freckled too easily under a Southern sun. No one giggled at this writerly interpolation. (Besides, we had the fair-skinned, dark-haired Vivien Leigh in the story's movie version to show us exactly how Scarlett looked. And yes, this time she was beautiful.)

When omniscience fell out of fashion, writers found salvation in having their characters, especially female characters, view themselves in mirrors to describe – and often critique – their own appearance. And although I’m now leaning toward other ways to describe a character’s appearance, I miss mirror images.

These, after all, have a long and honorable history – dating to biblical times -- of showing us not only what we look like, but by their subtle, “mirror-image” aspect, of conveying an eerily different aspect not only of our outward appearance but also of our personality. In fact, a shadowy, alter-ego version of ourselves.

What would the fairy tale of Snow White be without the evil stepmother’s magic mirror? Or Harry Potter’s story without the illusory wish-fulfilling Mirror of Erised?

When my heroine looks at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t see the color of her eyes or skin or hair – all too well-known to herself to comment on – but the color and texture of the bruises on her neck from a near-fatal encounter with an ex-lover.

Encountering her action again during manuscript revision, I thought long about it. Isn’t it natural for anyone to examine the impact of such visible blemishes? Is this a cliché only limited to females? And if the blemishes are on a part of the body not visible to the person, is there any option other than using a mirror? Would the mirror use seem less a cliché if the character were examining her back?

None of my critique partners complained, but readers will have the final say. Ultimately, I hope they’ll pardon her – and me – for the mirror image.