I didn't realise until after I published the Confidential Heir, how much hate the pregnancy trope got. If I'm being completely honest, I didn't even know what a trope was until a few months ago. I spent a while wavering between embarrassment that I wrote about the "dreaded" pregnancy trope, and the rest of the time, I wanted to understand why there was such hate for it.
That was of course after I figured out what a trope was. (Spoiler alert, it's just another way of saying a theme. A more official way of explaining it is "a common plot point or element.)
That made me wonder what tropes I hate and it would have to be a toss-up between miscommunication and slow burn. Neither will force me to DNF a book (which I believe the pregnancy trope does to a lot of readers), but the book is going to have to work a lot harder to win me over, than if it didn't have those tropes in them.
Miscommunication irritates me the most, because while I believe not everyone is self-aware, it's something that can easily be solved, so my imagination really struggles to justify a Romeo and Juliet level situation. I'm probably not the biggest fan of slow burn either, because I'm a firm believer in going for what you want, and my imagination struggles with this one too. (My mom will just tell you I'm impatient though.)
But that's why I now understand the hate the pregnancy trope gets, because it's so often used as the plot point to put a woman into a position where she is only the mother, and never more, which is of course, nonsense. We can be mothers, and we can also be more than that, It's all about choice and this is something I try and highlight in my writing wherever I possibly can.
(I also cringe about the time where I said I selected to write about Faerie's because I thought they were the super natural genre written the least about before I read Sarah J Maas books, but I digress. You don't know what you don't know!)
It did get me thinking about the trend of "tropes" and how the writing world keeps evolving. Am I aligning my marketing towards tropes now, because it's expected? Definitely. You can view one of the first efforts of that here. I would be stupid to not adapt my work towards trends that complement my author brand.
But I am going to be careful of catering my stories to tropes exclusively (or whatever trend comes next), because I'm not going to be the author that jumps on every trend. My primary goal will always be to try and write good stories that age well.