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Today we are talking romance tropes on the Romance Writers’ Weekly blog topic. We are talking about the tropes we love to read and to write.
When I began reading romance and then writing it, I had no idea that such a thing as a trope existed. I just knew what books I liked to read, and therefore those were the books I wrote. Tropes have been given a bad wrap by some, claiming that they are a crutch that writers use to hide bad writing. I do not agree with that.
I always go back to being a reader, and what as a reader helps me or doesn’t. To me a trope gives a reader a firm basis for what kind of stories they like. It gives a writer a way to say “Hey, you might like this story over here”. It is a tool so that readers and writers understand each other better.
For me, one of my favorite tropes is reunited love. My story published book Dealing with the
Viscount is a reunited lovers trope and the one I’m working on now, Courtesan’s Wicked Desire is also a reunited lovers trope. I think bringing two people back together makes for such a rich canvas of possibilities for the conflict, everything from ruined expectations to showing how people change and grow over time. As a reader I love to find out things about the characters’ backstories from people who were there
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As a lover of historical romance another trope I love to play with is the marriage of convenience. Marked for Love, the third book in my Improper Wives for Proper Lords series is a marriage of convenience. I think it amps up the conflict and the sexual tension simply with the unspoken expectations.
Do you have a trope you like? I’d love to hear about it! Next up we have A.S. Fenichel