Tag Archives: tropes

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 15 – A strange left turn and a half tank of gas

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Now that I’ve crossed the halfway point and am hovering somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,500 words, 50K by the end is a definite impossibility for me at this point. I’ll just have to soldier on and see if I can make 25K before this is all over.

In related news, it seems my story’s taken a twist for the mundane. The “typical RPG hero” I was set to groom has just become a member of the neighboring city guard, presumably as a stepping stone towards beating the hell out of the bastards who burned his village down. If this were an actual RPG, I’d have doomed poor Alex to a life of anonymity and probable death, since the city guards are the most likely combat-ready NPCs to die first when the Big Bad attacks. I still wonder if I might be able to turn this in my favor after all…

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 4 – Streak broken for the weekend

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I made it to 5,000 words on my third day, which would have put me in a position to finish on time had I kept up with my current pace. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be quite as lucky this weekend, as today I took a college placement test, and then went out to pick up Sonic Generations for my PlayStation 3 (because apparently Sega actually made an awesome Sonic game again). Tomorrow, I’m going to visit my brother for awhile, which is going to cut even more into my NaNo time. If I’m ever going to beat my old score, I’m going to have to majorly increase my output on Sunday and Monday so that I can at least get over 10,000. (Insert Vegeta scouter-crushing moment here.)

As for my incomprehensible surely-never-to-be-published novel, I’ve already checked off several clichés from The Grand List:

  • Hero awakened by mother to start the story/game
  • Hero’s hometown village destroyed in spectacular fashion (this is where I am right now)
  • Hero discovers mysterious girl he’s ready to help out for no apparent reason despite knowing nothing about her
  • Main male hero uses a sword as a weapon
  • Main female hero uses a staff (actually a magic wand, but whatever)

Some of them I obviously won’t be able to add due to this not being an interactive medium, but I still plan to cram as many of these tropes/clichés in as I can until the very end. For triple-word-score-cliché points, my story’s “plucky male hero” is modeled directly after Alex, the “default” hero from RPG Maker 2000, right down to his appearance. I knew I’d find a use for that beat-up old program one day.

A cliché storm is coming…

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Yes, I’ve decided to dip my hat into NaNoWriMo once again this year. I have no delusions that I’m going to churn out anything close to “original” or “award winning” here (especially as I’ve never actually FINISHED NaNo the first three times I attempted it), so I’m going to do the near-opposite – churn out a novel with as many hokey fantasy clichés, leaps of logic and half-dimensional characters with double the Mary Sue traits that I can cram into 50,000 words. Okay, maybe 25,000…I’m still not totally confident I’ll make it all the way.

You can thank/blame the classic Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés for my “handiwork” later.

10,000 Tweets, and Some Trope-based Poetry

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Yesterday, I officially crossed the 10,000 tweet threshold on Twitter after a little over three years using the microblog service. It came as a response to a question from film critic Scott Weinberg (someone who I’ve been following practically since I started tweeting) that very likely was meant to be a joke.

Compared to most other users, I’m quite chatty – I average 8 1/2 tweets per day. Somehow, I feel both silly and old, since I’ve used about 1,000 of those to take part in whatever the Twitter meme-of-the-moment is. Hey…they can’t all be tweets of earth-shattering importance. There’s only so much you can talk about in 140 characters or less. (Besides, I’m not famous enough to have that kind of pull…not by a long shot.) At the speed I’m going right now, I’ll probably be at 20K sometime around my 6-year Twitter anniversary, provided I don’t move on to the “next big thing” within that time period in an attempt to stay relevant.

In other news, I felt compelled to start writing poetry again after some time away from the pen and pad. How did I do it?

  1. Visit the TV Tropes Wiki.
  2. Press the “Random Item” button.
  3. Write a short poem about that trope.
  4. ???
  5. Profit!

Somehow, I landed on the Nerves of Steel trope page (a trait I don’t possess in real life), and it inspired me to write something which I like to call “Steel Sword, Steel Soul”:

Standing tall against the horde
Unbroken by stick or stone
Hands clutched tightly ’round his sword
Into battle, he is thrown

No happiness or sadness
As the conflict draws him in
Ahead is naught but madness
He vows not to let it win

For each foe who wants him dead
He will fight that much harder
Sweat dripping down from his head
A symbol of his ardor

Slashing through the field so fast
Unshakable blade dancer
But how long will his fight last?
Nobody knows the answer

Epic, no? Nah…it’s only 87 words long, but I thought it fit quite well with the trope I was trying to portray. I posted a copy of it on my deviantArt page, if you want to read and comment on it there, as well.