I recently saw a video of a 16-year-old girl flawlessly playing Eddie Van Halen's Eruption, complete with the baroque fingering style made famous by the late guitar virtuouso. I also saw another video of a 12-year-old boy playing the keyboard portion of Rick Wakeman's Six Wives of King Henry VIII and the fade-in to Yes's Roundabout.
That the epic performances of yesteryear are now the stuff kids practice on is just what happens to innovation. Some frontiersman of the arts ventures into the wilderness and a whole thriving town rises up on the newly-cleared ground.
The metahumans of Theodore Sturgeon, the Star Child of Arthur C. Clarke, or the mind-bending precogs of Philip K. Dick that were original in the Golden Age of SF are now well-trodden paths. They've become tropes.
In SF at least, tropes serve a useful purpose. They help keep authors from having to set up all the background, exposition, and the big reveal when the underpinnings of the story are already familiar to the audience. People like time travel stories, galactic shoot-em-ups, grand capers across the universe, space spies, space detectives, and the adventures of ragtag bands of survivors rising up against all odds. Those themes are timeless, and people keep coming back to them.
But they get bored easily. So as a writer, what should you do? Should you avoid tropes?
Not entirely.
There's a saying in journalism that if you're covering a story with a familiar theme, get a new angle on it. Kid won a spelling bee? What's special about her? Unlikely hero from a crumbled, broken household? Mastered language despite profoundly nonverbal autism? Something else?
As a writer, the basic story may be a familiar one: boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl, boy traverses time and space to find girl. But what twist or detail can you add that changes the narrative? Girl finds boy after building her own time-traveling spaceship to finally reach her one true love?
Tropes represent roads where there were once only footpaths in thick woods. They're still how we get from point A to point B; just a little more civilized.
You have to be especially talented to write a compelling, story about the road itself, or you have to make the story about something other than the road. Now that it's there, what happens on that road? Why? What are the consequences, and who stands to gain or lose everything?
Take the well-traveled road if you have to, but venture just beyond the edge now and again. Don't just change something superficial in a well-trodden journey--your audience will be able to tell at once that your F'knwai are simply H. G. Wells's Eloi. Instead, focus on unique three-dimensional characters deeply immersed in your world and having authentic reactions to their circumstances. Let them exert gravity on the plot and bend it toward their ends rather than moving them around like chessmen. Genuine human drama makes their story YOUR story, and unless your time traveler is exactly the same as H. G. Wells's, his story will have a different beginning, middle, and end.
It's rare indeed when a story tells us something we haven't heard already. But if it can make us think something we haven't thought before, it's still new.
