 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. Before we get into it, I just want to say really quickly that you'll notice I'm... Sorry, try to keep a straight face for this. Um, I'm growing a glorious moustache. I mean, give me a break. It's the start of the month. I'm growing a moustache for Movember. I do it every single year in memory of my father to try and raise money for the Movember Foundation. It is a truly great charity that personally does mean a lot to me. That raises money to promote positive men's health, prevent suicide, and raise awareness for prostate cancer. There's a link in the description below if you want to help out. If you can spare even just a couple of dollars, you would be making a big difference to a lot of people. Cliche's are undoubtedly the boogie man of the writing world. We're all pretty scared of them and for good reason. Tropes are what build a story and attract a reader. But one wrong move and you could have a well-used cliche on your hands that could possibly have the same effect as dropping a handful of dog shit in your reader's lap. A cliche, a plot device, or a motif that has been used so often and so uncreatively that it gives readers the feeling of chugging sour milk. I'm not here to give you any advice or tell you how to do cliche good, but I do want to chat about a topic that interests me and it's one I've been thinking about quite a lot recently. Subverted tropes. It's an easy thing to understand but an incredibly difficult thing to implement in your writing. I'm sure you know what it means but allow me to explain it to you to you anyway. Whether or not you asked. I'll explain it like you're a baby. A little, a little baby, dumb, dumb little baby doesn't know what subverted trope is. Oh, little baby gonna croak. Okay, subverted tropes are essentially when you build towards a plot device. Something that the reader has seen a million times and then just when they think they've got it figured out. Just when they think they know what's gonna happen, you spin it in a different direction. Again, sounds easy but not quite. Especially now in today's day and age, subverted tropes have become so common that they are almost the new tropes. It's getting to the point where doing things the old way and using tropes in the well-used older ways would almost be the new subverting. Anyway, a really dumb example I can give you here is one I always find myself thinking of. It's a clip from Family Guy. I know, I know white millennial dude likes Family Guy. Shut up. Oh, well, at least it's not raining. That's a very on-the-nose example but you get my point. You make the audience look one way while you sow the seeds of something different over here. Don't look into that too much. I personally think that that's the trick with doing subverted tropes well. You can't just do something unexpected for the sake of surprising the reader with no warning. I feel like you have to leave clues or breadcrumbs along the way. Again, that's what makes things very difficult because the reader might be big-brained. They may figure it out but that's what's going to separate the good writers from the mediocre ones. To summarize, my personal belief is that to avoid cliches or overused tropes, you make the reader believe that they know what is happening. Make them look this way and leave clues over here. Small clues that they'll see out of the corner of their eye that won't think too much on. And then bam, you flip the table and hopefully the reader will turn around and go, Man, that makes so much sense now, dude. Because of the clues, right? How easy is that? Obviously not all cliches are tropes and vice-versa, blah, blah, blah. But the point here is simply that I don't think cliches or tropes need to be avoided entirely. If they make sense for your story, use them. The trick is just to spin the cliche in a way that feels unique. Rather than having the chosen one just be a chosen one because prophecy. You could have them be the chosen one because they accidentally walked into a cursed crypt. Wrong place, wrong time. Maybe they weren't meant to be the chosen one but they accidentally killed the real chosen one and inadvertently took their place. Maybe the protagonist, the main character of the story isn't the chosen one but is the friend of the chosen one. There's lots of different ways to do it and I'm not saying that any of the ideas I just gave you haven't been done before but they do feel specific enough that you can do them in many different ways that feel fresh. But yeah, that's about it. I'm sorry if this video felt kind of random. I've been really, really getting into my work in progress for NaNoWriMo. Good luck with NaNoWriMo by the way. And avoiding cliches has been a really big thing on my mind lately. With writing a fantasy series, it's so easy to fall into cliches and I'm trying to avoid that. So I wanted to chat about it and see what you think. Speaking of NaNoWriMo, you should join me over on Twitch. I stream there like three times a week getting a bunch of writing done. It's a whole lot of fun. We don't just write, we actually hang out, chat, talk about writing and pretty much everything else. It's like a big writer's social club. Link below otherwise you can find my Twitch page here. Again, if you can spare a couple of dollars for the November Foundation, you'd be helping out a really great cause. Thanks so much for watching, especially for watching through the whole video. I really do appreciate it and I hope I see you in the next one. Now get off YouTube and go right. Catch ya.