Conventional Creativity: Tropes as a Generative Tool  

Is it possible to incorporate tropes into your work without cheating the writing process, your imagination, or your readers? Yes! Tropes can be an endless source of inspiration for your authorial goals -- whether personal exploration, literary critique, social commentary, fantasy world-building, linguistic complexity, or other – and they provide fuel to power works of complexity and depth. In this seminar, we’ll learn what tropes are, explore a few ways to deliberately engage with them, and study some short works from multiple genres that put these ideas into practice. You’ll leave with an understanding of tropes’ incredible usefulness and flexibility for writers.

Beth Anderson (who also publishes as A.E. Dethlefsen) is a writer and night person from Austin, Texas. Her latest story is found in issue 81 of Not One of Us, and previous work has appeared in Extrasensory Overload: An Anthology of Speculative Excess, Akashic, Beneath Strange Stars, Trembling with…