Fourth Wing Fantasy: Eleven Tropes in the first Three Pages
USA Today bestselling author Jennifer Hilt joins us to talk about how to embed tropes into your books to make them more irresistible to readers.
This article is my first guest post. I’m experimenting with bringing in authors I like and trust to talk about their process. Jennifer Hilt is one of my favorite people and a great teacher.
If you are a paid member, I recommend reading my book How to Become a Successful Author, where I talk about my process of writing books. You also have access to my course Write a Great Novel, as one of your paid member bonuses. If you are not a paid member, then you can access our full archive with a 7-day free trial.
We’re trying something different today. I’ve been thinking about adding guest posts to The Author Stack for a while, and I wanted to start with a previous guest of our Author Ecosystems membership.
writes the wonderful Trope Thesaurus series, and we had her in the membership last month to talk about how to use tropes to make your books more hooky with readers.She is currently running a Kickstarter for Trope Thesaurus Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is obviously my jam as a mostly portal fantasy author. Everyone loved her talk, so I asked her to write a post for you about how to incorporate tropes into a fantasy series. If you like it, I hope you’ll check out the campaign.
I bought the fantasy Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros because it was enthusiastically recommended to me in two days by two people, one in their seventies and one in their twenties.
This intrigued me, so a quick Amazon search revealed that Fourth Wing has over eighty-eight thousand reviews. Yes, that's right, not a typo. The reason for the popularity? Think Hunger Games with sentient dragons.
Incidentally, Amazon convinced my older friend to buy it from Amazon Ads and my younger one from TikTok; no marketing surprises, but I'm always curious about how readers find books.
With recommendations from two different sources, this book had to be a trope bonanza. I trekked to my local bookstore for a physical copy to mark up all the tropes as I read it.
Before I get too far ahead, and in case you haven't read the book, here's my logline for the story setup:
Violet must survive Conscription Day to become a dragon rider, but her lack of training and physical weakness means she faces certain death.
All my good intentions to sip this book slowly slipped away as soon as I started to read. Did I mention that Fourth Wing is 500 pages?
Here is what I found—eleven tropes in three pages. Again, not a typo. This signals to me as a storyteller that this author has some serious story structure. As a reader, it hooks me with all the juicy relationships.
How does Yarros do this? Let's start by looking at the first two lines of Fourth Wing; they set up the story with one big goal—to survive.
Conscription Day is always the deadliest. Maybe that's why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning—because I know it might be my last.
It's not only about goals in the first two sentences; the first line sets up three tropes—violence, forced proximity, and ticking time bomb. We can see how tropes immediately combine with goals to lay out this world. But more than that, Yarros knows what fantasy readers expect, and she's prepared to deliver.
How does the author do that? By telling us that Conscription Day is a ticking time bomb imbedded with violence and forced proximity.
The protagonist can’t run away or delay the event. Her goal is to survive the Day.
Speaking of goals, we know nothing about the protagonist (spoiler alert: her gender is female) except that she has a meaningful and measurable goal. If we're meeting for the first time, I'm a total freak about such goals having these two criteria.
Goals like this are important because they lay the framework for the whole story. As a reader, we are enticed, not lost in many unnecessary details. Yarros will parcel them out later, like snacks, to keep us engaged. This setup tells me the big stuff is coming, so settle in for the ride.
But more than that, I'm already engaging in the story. How can the twenty minutes I set aside to check out this book be stretched? How long can I push dinner prep? Can I move my waiting revisions to later? That is the kind of emotional connection we, as authors, seek. When we light that fire, we are readers; we're creating a fan—the most treasured goal of storytellers.
We need to weave goals with tropes when we write, so let's look at more tropes in these early pages.
More Tropes
Here are the eleven tropes I found in the first three pages for the protagonist, Violet;
Fish out of water, Scar, Family, Forced proximity, Ticking Time Bomb, Military, Politics, Quest, Redemption, Royalty, Ugly Duckling, Victim, Woman in peril, Workplace.
These tropes are communicated through:
Dialogue with her mother and sister,
Violet's thoughts, and
Actions (hers, her mother's, and her sister's).
Packing all these tropes in three pages shows us how tropes function as relationships. That is how the reader is pulled in and not lost.
Since I'm only discussing the early pages, there is nothing here to spoil the story for you. If anything, I hope it encourages you to read the story and see what you think about tropes.
Violet's tropes show that she has a life-threatening quest ahead. But she doesn't exist in isolation; Yarros ties her tropes in with her family.
Her sister, Mira, is a highly regarded warrior in the same division Violet tries to survive in. Mira is anguished (family, protector) about Violet’s quest and argues with the general about Violet. Guess what? Their mother is a decorated military general (boss, family, military). Her mother (antagonist) can force Violet to follow her expectations in training (politics, royalty).
The three women share the emotional scar of their brother Brennan’s death in battle, plus their father's death soon after.
That is a lot to pack into three pages, but Yarros keeps the story moving to stay manageable in details.
More on Goal, Motivation, and Conflict (GMC)
I want to know more about how GMC works in the Fourth Wing setup.
Here's what the GMC is at this point.
Goal: Survive Conscription Day (both meaningful and measurable)
Motivation: Survival (the why of the story)
Conflict: She only has six months of training as opposed to life long, she's physically weaker than the successful candidates, and her mother is a general who insists she complete this program despite her disadvantages.
The more the conflict opposes the goals, the better the story. By that, I mean we're making our goal meaningful and measurable (survive the upcoming trial), but the obstacles to completing the goal are the story meat.
Consider it this: our characters need interaction to move our story along. We risk losing the reader's interest if it's too easy or boring.
In Fourth Wing, Yarros has packed the deck with built-in conflict.
The protagonist’s boss is skeptical she can complete the challenge ahead.
Good.
But what if the protagonist’s boss was also a decorated military general with an impressive war record who happens to be the protagonist’s mother?
Better.
How about the protagonist's boss, a decorated military general with an impressive war record, who happens to be her mother and has already lost her son in battle?
Best.
See how that conflict increased?
The protagonist is aptly named Violet. She's a trained scholar suddenly thrust into a warrior role. She lacks the physique, the skills, and, according to almost everyone, the heart for this challenge. Her name reinforces her unsuitability. We're immediately interested in her journey. Why?
Knowing the specific genre expectations is part of the whole deal when we talk about tropes and GMC. Yarros has also baked fantasy genre expectations right in these opening lines.
We love fantasy because it has a high-risk, high-reward storyline. We don’t yet know much about the characters beyond they face death regularly. We're assured that this author understands what fantasy readers want, and she's prepared to deliver.
Worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is the third strand that braids trope and goals, motivation, and conflict together. It is what boosts a story beyond the mechanics into a unique creation.
In Fourth Wing, Conscription Day has story elements we understand---again, life or death. There’s no backstory to trip over, and we're ready to jump right into the story. I don't know the history of the Day or any details, but I know enough to want to read more. Yarros wisely parcels those details out with enough to keep us engaged but not to overwhelm us---that is our goal as writers.
I hope this encourages you to think about how tropes can be story-building blocks. They can connect our characters by their relationships, which gives us more conflict.
If you like that, you can access the recording of her interview, along with others including guests Steve Pieper, Becca Syme, Steph Pajones, Theodora Taylor, and more, by joining our Author Ecosystem membership.
Make sure to check out Jennifer’s Kickstarter, and definitely read her other books in the series. I keep them handy for reference near my desk.
Jennifer Hilt is a USA Today Bestselling author who has worked as a plotter and concept creator. She has written twenty four books across four pen names as well as her urban fantasy series: The Undead Detective. She teaches craft classes and is a podcast regular extolling the virtues of trope twisting.
She is also the author of The Trope Thesaurus, Horror Trope Thesaurus and Trope Thesaurus Romance. She lives in Seattle where she collects dictionaries in unfamiliar languages, binges Scandi-Noir series, and shouts out tropes from the comfort of her couch.
UPCOMING KICKSTARTER: Get Your Book Selling Direct to Readers
Monica and I have been talking about direct sales for a long time, and many of you have asked us to put together another definitive guide like we did for Kickstarter.
So that’s what we did, and it’s coming in November.
Learn how to sell from your website, crush it on Kickstarter, make a profit at conventions, and generally succeed at direct sales. It’s going to be a monster book, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
If you like this article, consider becoming a paid member. If you are a paid member, I recommend reading my book How to Become a Successful Author, where I talk about my process of writing books. You also have access to my course Write a Great Novel, as one of your paid member bonuses.
If you are not a paid member, then you can access our full archive with a 7-day free trial.
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It's a relief to know that we don't need to do more new thing just dig deeper into what we are doing, right? I loved your article about How the Magic Happens! Describing how we get to all the places we do is difficult in the creative process.
This article was so interesting! As someone who DNF’d Fourth Wing because of the heavy language this was a really fascinating read for me. I read the first 3 chapters of the book and really liked it because those first 3 chapters set up the book really well and made a lot of promises to the reader that really entranced me and this article explains why: the tropes! Thank you! I really love that you’re doing guest posts now, Russell.