Shooting The Hero: Write Against Plot Tropes

Fairy tales are sweet as sugar. They reward heroic characters with happy endings. Good triumphs over bad, love prevail and every loose end is nicely resolved by The End. H.E.A warms our souls by saving us from reality. Yes, let’s read about the good fight while finding social harmony and love everlasting. Give me a gooey fairy tale so I can smile.

"Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult."
-Albert Camus

Dreams and fairy tales are fantastic but life itself has beautiful stories too. They lead us along peculiar paths that take us to worlds we wouldn’t expect to visit. Take the happy girl who, at the age of six, dreamed of mermaids and unicorns, was a studious university graduate at twenty, but at the age of thirty, struggled to keep her life together because one bad decision followed another. The desire to make everyone else happy and put herself last had ruined her. At fifty, she’s now alone, poor and abused by strangers. Or let’s talk about the popular guy who has wealth and good looks on his side but is being torn apart by poor mental health. Through no fault of his own, he has a mind cancer growing inside his head. It’s causing disturbing visions to appear. He’ll die crossing the street because he imagined it to be a flooded river with his mother trapped on the other side. Some will mistake his death for suicide. Both characters are heroes in their own right but neither of them will appear like that until the last second. Their stories aren’t conventional fairy tales. Their endings won’t be conventionally happy either.

Burn those clichés! Prepare to shoot the heroes!

-Michael