vintagegeekculture:

Rod Serling once gave the best advice to writing:
take however many books you’re reading right now, and double that.

This is probably not the answer you want to hear, but it’s a
mistake to think in terms of tropes. A lot of people go into writing with their
heads: they want to subvert expectations in a clever way. They write because
they want to get a pat on the head for being smart (”in this novel, it
turns out the Love Interest is actually the Dragon with a hint of Lightning
Bruiser!”). Overused tropes and clichés aren’t the problem, though. When people say
they didn’t like a story because it was cliché or overdone, what they mean is,
they didn’t believe it.

If you want to tell a military scifi story, do that. It’s
like a piece of advice an acting coach once gave me: no matter how many actors
there are, there’s always room for one more good one.

If you want to tell a story about space pirates (to pick a
particularly common scifi theme), tell a story about space pirates, but “don’t
try to impress me, try to convince me.” This means identifying exactly what it
is you want to say and convincing me of it. A lot of people bristle at this
because for some strange reason, we have the first culture in human history
that is suspicious of clear communication, and for some reason, loves
ambiguity.

So, if you want to tell a story about space pirates, you
have to identify what it is you want to say. Suppose you have the idea that all
criminal organizations are is just “outsider capitalism.” It’s family and
protection for people who have none of the above, and that the difference
between pirates and a big business is simply that one is run by people on the
outside who “weren’t invited to the party.”

So, if that’s what you want to say, a story about space
pirates starts to take shape. Your main character comes to life, as he is the
person the audience sees the story through and we like who he likes, trusts who
he trusts. You start the story inside a big interstellar corporation, but our
hero sees they practice all kinds of underhanded traits he later sees in the
pirates, except the “big guys” get away with it. Since a good rule is that the
main character is the person in the story who gets into the most trouble, you
have him as a stiff executive who gets kicked out of a corporation, who then is
forced to join the pirates because like everyone else there, he has nowhere
else to go. Your main character is in some way an unfinished, imperfect person; the point of the story is to have him improve or learn something. 

At first, because he has the expectations the audience does,
our hero believes they’re all cut-throats, but we see a different side to them:
we see them not as evil, but people who are somehow unacceptable to society in
some way. All the pirate characters are created to drive that idea home. One
was pushed off his home by a corporation; one is a member of a religious group
that isn’t liked; one is a cyborg, which are discriminated against; one is a
runaway clone of an executive about to be chopped up for parts. None of them
have families, since the point of the story is to show how organizations like
this can be surrogate families. The story starts to write itself: our hero tries to protect his surrogate family (as our hero cares, we care, too), and we see the pirates get punished for things the “big guys” get away with. 

The finale writes itself: the pirates fight the big corporation and our hero chooses to side with the pirates even after a final temptation. Endings should feel easier to write than beginnings; a story is like a funnel, at the beginning, anything can happen, but as it goes on, the range of possibilities narrow until one final outcome is possible. 

See? Right there, we have a story that subverts
expectations and does something interesting with an overused trope (space pirates), but subverting expectations is a means, not an end in and of itself. It’s all about expressing clearly what you have to say.

Thanks.
Now I want to read this space pirate story.