Episode 331 - Tropes as Tools in Mysteries & Thrillers with Sara Rosett
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Sara Rosett discusses TROPES AS TOOLS IN MYSTERIES & THRILLERS, including the differences among tropes, genre conventions, and clichés, how scars and secrets function as plotting engines, how to scale the same trope for different genres, using tropes to inject new energy into a series, and what international mysteries can teach you about inventive plotting.
Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over 30 mysteries for readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunits. She also writes nonfiction for authors including, How to Write a Series, How to Outline a Cozy Mystery, and Trope Thesaurus: Mystery and Thriller. Sara hosts two podcasts: Mystery Books Podcast for readers and the Wish I’d Known Then For Writers Podcast with Jami Albright.
Episode Links
http://www.SaraRosettBooks.com
https://www.instagram.com/sararosett/
https://www.pinterest.com/srosett/
https://books2read.com/MysteryandThriller
Great companion episodes:
Episode 288 - Decoding Storytelling Tropes with Jennifer Hilt
Episode 325 - Reveals as the Striptease of Fiction with Tiffany Yates Martin
Summary & Transcript
Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of over thirty mysteries and the host of the Mystery Books Podcast. She also co-hosts the Wish I’d Known Then for Writers podcast with Jami Albright and writes nonfiction for authors, including HOW TO WRITE A SERIES, HOW TO OUTLINE A COZY MYSTERY, and most recently THE TROPE THESAURUS: MYSTERY AND THRILLER, co-authored with Jennifer Hilt. In this conversation, Sara explored how tropes function as creative tools for mystery and thriller writers—and why understanding them can improve both your craft and your marketing.
TROPES ARE NOT CLICHÉS
Sara drew a clear line between tropes and clichés. A cliché is what you get when you use a trope without adding depth. The dumb jock who is dumb in every scene is a cliché; the dumb jock who secretly runs an online book club about classics is a character. The difference lies in layering—backstory, scars, secrets, surprises that complicate the reader’s initial assumption. Jennifer Hilt’s framework of scars and secrets is particularly useful here: give your characters wounds they do not want exposed, and those wounds become both the emotional engine and the plotting engine of the story.
SCARS AND SECRETS AS PLOTTING TOOLS
In mystery specifically, Sara explained, nearly every character needs a secret of some kind to keep the investigation alive. If six characters each carry a wound or a secret, the sleuth has six threads to pull—and those threads generate clues, red herrings, and misdirection. She described it as a solar system: the main whodunit is the sun, and the smaller character mysteries orbit around it. The key difference from romance, where scars often drive characters toward healing and connection, is that in mystery they function as puzzle pieces. A character’s secret explains why they lied about an alibi or behaved strangely in a particular scene. The reader’s pleasure comes from fitting those pieces together.
TROPES VERSUS GENRE CONVENTIONS
Matty raised the question of where tropes end and genre conventions begin. Sara distinguished between the two: a convention is a rule of the road—in cozy mystery, the murder happens offstage and the content stays clean. A trope is a recognizable story element that can be played with, inverted, or transplanted across genres. The locked room mystery is one of the few tropes that mystery readers actively seek out by name. Others, like the return to the small town or the animal sidekick, are more common in cozies but can be adapted to fit thrillers or other subgenres by adjusting tone and scale.
SCALING TROPES BETWEEN MYSTERY AND THRILLER
Sara and Jennifer divided the book along their respective strengths—Sara in mystery, Jennifer in thriller—and Sara described how the same trope operates differently depending on genre. Hidden identity in a thriller looks like THE BOURNE IDENTITY: international locations, high-speed action, life-or-death stakes. Hidden identity in a mystery looks like LUDWIG: a smaller, quieter story where a socially awkward man impersonates his missing twin brother, a police detective, and navigates a small cast of characters. The trope is identical; the scale and tone are not. Sara suggested that writers can take any trope and dial it up for thriller or dial it down for mystery, as long as they match the pacing and expectations of their audience.
She offered a particularly inventive example of playing with the locked room trope: instead of figuring out how someone got out of a locked room, what if the puzzle is how to get something into a locked room without being detected? That inversion—which she compared to a reverse bank heist—preserves the familiar structure while delivering a surprise.
REFRESHING A SERIES WITH TROPES
For series writers who feel they have exhausted their ideas, Sara recommended browsing a trope thesaurus the way you might browse a menu. Picking up a trope from another genre—enemies to lovers recast as a buddy-cop dynamic, for instance—can inject new energy into a long-running series without alienating readers who value familiarity. The goal is same but different: enough recognition to satisfy the reader’s expectations, enough novelty to keep the story sparkling.
USING AI TO IDENTIFY TROPES IN YOUR OWN WORK
Sara acknowledged that writers are often blind to the tropes in their own manuscripts. She and Jennifer traded drafts of THE TROPE THESAURUS and Jennifer spotted tropes Sara had missed entirely. For writers without a co-author to do that analysis, Sara suggested using AI: feed your manuscript in and ask it to identify the major tropes. Matty described doing exactly that with her thriller series and discovering that found family was central to her story—something she had written instinctively but never identified in marketing terms. Recognizing the trope allowed her to call it out in her sales description and reach readers who specifically seek it.
INTERNATIONAL MYSTERIES AS A STUDY TOOL
Sara closed with a recommendation that American mystery and thriller writers look beyond American entertainment. She has found lighter-toned mystery shows in French and British television, inventive plotting in Korean and Japanese dramas, and satisfying character arcs in limited series that tell a complete story in ten or sixteen episodes rather than stretching indefinitely across seasons. She cited MURDER BY THE LAKE, a German-Austrian series set around a border lake, as an example of how a single setting can generate an extraordinary variety of mystery plots. The show also layers one character’s backstory into the lake setting itself, using the location as both a plot device and a thematic element. Sara noted that core tropes—the great detective, the odd-couple pairing, the locked room—appear to be genuinely international, turning up in Korean dramas and Japanese fiction alongside their Western counterparts.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to the Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Sara Rosett. Hey, Sara, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Sara: Good. How are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I am doing great, and just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Sara Rosett is the USA Today bestselling author of Over Their 30 Mysteries For readers who enjoy atmospheric settings and puzzling whodunit, Sara hosts two podcasts, Mystery Books Podcast for readers and the Wish I’d Known Then for Writers podcast with Jami Albright, which is a highly, highly
She also writes, nonfiction for authors, including HOW TO WRITE A SERIES, HOW TO OUTLINE A COZY MYSTERY, and most recently, THE TROPE THESAURUS: MYSTERY AND THRILLER with the trope queen herself. Jennifer Hiltt, who is has also been a guest on the podcast. And, not only do we have, Jennifer on the podcast back in episode 288 talking about
but this episode is coming at a really interesting time because two recent episodes were, episode 325 reveals as these strip tease of fiction with Tiffany Yates Martin, and I think talking about, mystery and thriller tropes in terms of reveals. We’ll be a fun follow onto that conversation. And then the other recent conversation was in episode 326, story first genre, second lessons from romantic for every writer with Brenna Bailey-Davies and Brenna And I had a lot of conversations about, the role of tropes in genre and, and the complications of, accommodating tropes when you’re doing genre blending
So we have kind of a theme going here. And today we’re going to be talking
[00:01:37] Matty: And I’m curious, first of all, just how did you and, Jen end up pairing up to write this book?
[00:01:41] Sara: I had always thought about writing a trope a, a book about mystery tropes because I feel like there that was kinda a gap in the market. There weren’t a lot of books about mystery tropes in particular. There were general trope books, and that was one, one. Partial reason I started Mystery Books podcast because I want to talk
But then I thought, well, I’ll just talk about these books. I’ll mention the tropes and then I’ll just save those episodes and transcripts and I’ll let them build up and then I’ll pull the tropes and you know, collate them into a book, which I never did. And then Jennifer was on our podcast and she mentioned, you know, she was working on this new, or she was planning, I think, to work on the new.
Mystery and Thriller trout book, and I thought, Hmm, I don’t think I’m ever going to do that book on my own. So I messaged her and said, Hey, if you’re interested in, you know, collaborating on that, I would love to do that. And she replied back and said, yes, you would love it. And, and we just went from there. It was, it was very easy to get going.
[00:02:39] Matty: Yeah, well I think that, Pairing you guys up is perfect because, you know, she’s so interested in tropes as a, as a writing mechanism, and you obviously had the deep dive experience on the mystery and thriller front. so that was really fun to see when I saw that you guys were, were paired up on that.
[00:02:54] Matty: And whenever I speak with anyone about tropes, I always like to talk about how tropes differ from cliches. Can you talk
[00:03:02] Sara: Yes, yes. So I feel like whatever you take could be a cliche, but you can make it not a cliche by going deeper. So if you have a character that’s, you know, the dumb jock character. If you write them as only a dumb jock and they’re dumb in every scene, then that’s what all you’ve got. But if you layer in some backstory and give them some more depth and maybe add a few surprises in there, maybe
You know about classics, you know, something like that, that you go, oh, that isn’t quite what I thought. You give them a little more depth and then you can let layer in, like Jennifer likes to talk about scars and secrets and things like that. And that really can make your character
So you may have, you know, something that starts out as a cliche, but the more you add to it, the more it becomes less of a cliche.
[00:04:02] Matty: Well, I like that idea about, the wounds and scars being important tropes and specific to mystery and thriller. How does that play out? Like what are examples of tropes that would serve
[00:04:18] Sara: Well, I think that they are great for thinking about. Secrets that your characters have. , because when I do a, when I plot a mystery, every, almost every character needs a secret of some type to keep the mystery element going and for to have things for your sleuth to discover. So if you have six characters and they all have
A or a secret, then you’ve got a lot that can be explored a lot for your sleuth to find, and your secrets may be things that are not. You know what? One person might consider a shameful secret. Another person might think, nah, that’s not a big deal. That’s, you know, take me or leave me that way. But other people, you know, it is something that they
They might have something that they don’t want exposed. So if you have wounds that people don’t want other people to know about. If you have scars, things that have, you know, wounded them, then you can use those things in your plotting and they can become clues and red herrings and
So you’ve got, you know, your main mystery of who done it usually. But then you have all these other little smaller mysteries, kind of like a solar system orbiting around the, the sun of the main mystery, you know?
[00:05:36] Matty: And would the use of, character wounds or scars be unto itself a trope? Or is it the case that for different genres, different genres are going to want to have those wounds and scars play out
[00:05:51] Sara: Oh, I would think each genre is going to have very specific sort of expectations around scars and secrets, because I feel like in a romance. you may have those, but I feel like romance is, you’re making progress towards healing a lot of times and towards a relationship. So maybe those scars and secrets are exposed in the
And then there’s a point where the two characters coming together, it’s. They help each other through these difficult times or learn to cope with things together. And I don’t know, you could have that in a mystery, but I don’t think mystery readers have that expectation with scars and secrets. I think it’s more, for them, it’s more of a puzzle.
There’s a lot of like trying to figure out how all the parts fit together. And so sometimes, you know, you get this, oh, this person has this secret and that’s why they behaved this way and that explains why they lied and said they didn’t have an alibi. So I don’t know that a mystery reader would have the same expectations of that type of trope, but you could use it, you know, however you want.
You could say, what would, what would my mystery be like if I tipped these, you know, things that are more familiar in this romance genre and applied them to my genre? And just see what happened. And if you don’t like it, you know, take it out.
[00:07:10] Matty: Yeah, this is a very nice companion piece to the conversation I had with Brenna about, genre blending. And I think it’s, one of the things we’ve. Talked about is the idea that genre is, oftentimes more useful from a marketing point of view than from a
There’s a mixture of that because the one that I always go back to is, I remember years and years and years ago, the first time someone explained to me that the difference between a romance and a love story is a romance had to have a happy ending and a love story doesn’t have
And I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Like lots of things became clear to me about, you know, the types of books people liked and didn’t like the ones they recommended and didn’t recommend based on that. And so that is both a marketing decision because you have to decide if you’re going to have a happy ending or a sad ending.
And it’s a craft question because you have to, you have to either meet the expectations of the readers based on your presentation of the genre. Or you just have to accept that you’re really going to disappoint or possibly piss people off if you’re presenting it in one way, but
And I think, I mean, I guess that the same thing an, an equivalent for mysteries would be like the cozy mystery and the, trope. You can let me know if I’m using the word trope in the right way here of you can’t have the murder take place on, on the page. Would you consider that a
[00:08:36] Sara: Yeah, I think for me that’s a genre convention that a cozy is usually clean, you know, fairly like you clean, like in that there’s not a lot of violence and gore on the page. The death usually takes place off stage. yeah. So I would think that’s more of a convention that an expectation readers have. I think mystery does have,
Well, well-known tropes that are talked about among the readership. I think mystery doesn’t have that as much they, I, the main mystery specific trope that I think people talk about is the locked room. That’s one that it’s like, oh yes, locked room. We love locked room mysteries. , because it’s very much associated with the mystery and it’s
And that I think makes it more a recognizable mystery trope, whereas just, I think there’s a convention. Yeah.
[00:09:30] Matty: In the cozy mystery world, would a trope be something like, oftentimes there’s an, an animal, you know, associated with the, with the sleuth Is, would that be more of a trope?
[00:09:41] Sara: Yeah, it could be. Yeah. I think another, Like I, that’s a sidekick basically. So you could have an animal sidekick, you could have, you know, different, you could have a computer sidekick, you know, so you could personally, you know, have an AI sidekick or something for, you know, a futuristic type story.
But, yeah, I think another cozy mystery trope would be, the return to the small town. And you can use that in a thriller. You know, Jennifer uses that in the book, but her example she uses is justified, which. Not cozy, I don’t think really, but like in a cozy mystery, you would take
Away. Gone out into the big world to make their way. And usually something has happened, often something shameful, something that they’re not happy with and they have to return home because you know, the only place you can go when you’re down, out is home where you know they’ll have to take you in. And so, you know, you come back and then you’ve got all these relationships that you had that come back into
All the friendships and romantic relationships and then, you know, it’s just a different in tone, I think with that.
[00:10:48] Matty: Yeah, and I guess maybe a difference for me to clarify for myself the difference between the genre conventions and the tropes would be, that things like you can’t have the murder on the page or. is more, it’s like the rules of the road, assuming that you’re, you’re not intentionally writing a, a genre twisting kind of, plot.
You know, that, that you want to satisfy the reader, not like shock the reader or, or bring the reader up of short or something like that. and so those things have to be in place for a book to be considered a part
[00:11:21] Sara: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that, you know, you’re talking about shocking the reader or doing something unexpected. If you had, like you were talking about the mystery or the, the difference between a love story and a romance. And if you write a book where your readers are expecting one thing and you give them something else that does, it can create a lot of buzz.
And I think sometimes people do that intentionally. Like they intentionally take elements that maybe a cozy reader wouldn’t maybe want or expect, but then they. Add these things and it causes, you know, talk and controversy and you know, it can work in any genre. You know, you can flip things around and so sometimes that works to get buzz, but then I don’t know if that’s really helpful in building a readership.
[00:12:10] Matty: It does seem more like something that someone who is established and now has kind of the space in order to do something like that is better, better positioned to do it both because, you know, they’re not banking their whole career on this particular group of readers being satisfied. but. They, they’ve illustrated that they know how to comply with the genre conventions and the tropes.
And so it’s kind of like, you know, the recommendation that if you’re, if you’re going to, do abstract art, then you have to be able to illustrate that you can do representational art as well. And so it’s, it’s a choice. It’s not like, because this is the only way I know how to draw, draw whatever it is.
and if you’ve already illustrated that, you know how to com, you know, play within the lines and now you’re intentionally playing outside the lines, you could kind of get away with it more, I think.
[00:12:57] Sara: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Kind of like you have to know the
[00:13:01] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:14] Matty: So we we’re talking a lot about mystery and I think that I don’t have as much trouble thinking about tropes in the mystery area as I do in the thriller area. So talk a little bit about what, what constitutes tropes in the thriller genre.
[00:13:18] Sara: Okay, well. When we sat down to break all this out, when we sat down to write this book, Jennifer is much more versed in thrillers and I’m more versed in industry, so we kind of just divvied everything up. But she has an interesting philosophy about tropes, which I’ve, I’m kind of coming around to. I didn’t, she’s much deeper in, into tropes than I am, but she feels like most tropes
maybe a orphan trope, and that can go in any genre. You can have, you know, friends to lovers or in the, but then you just kind of twist it and change it just a little bit in your genre. And so that in the
So like you’re maybe going from enemies to friends and you know, she feels like you can kind of sort things and shift them in each genre, like dial them in for that genre, I guess. And so I feel like the thriller genre, you can take the same trope and just change it just a
You can use that in a thriller and think about like THE BOURNE IDENTITY and then compare that to,a mystery use of the, hidden identity might be something like REMINGTON STEELE or LUDWIG. I don’t know if you’ve seen
[00:14:36] Matty: I haven’t,
[00:14:36] Sara: show. It’s a, a man who has a twin brother. His brother goes missing, and his brother.
A police detective and his sister-in-law calls him and says, I need you to go and pretend to be him and go find out what he was working on. And he’s not. He’s very socially awkward. And so it’s a, you know, it’s like this whole thing. So you can, like, if you think about THE BOURNE IDENTITY compared to something like LUDWIG, then you’ve kind of got,
So I think you can take different tropes and use them in each genre. But you just have to match the tone and the pacing of the genre you’re in because I feel like a thriller is much faster paced and a bigger A is usually a little bit smaller, so. The BOURNE IDENTITY is these going to all these different international locations and there’s lots of action.
Whereas like LUDWIG, it’s a smaller, quieter story, you know, and he goes to the police department, he meets the little cast of characters there, and it’s more of a puzzle. Like what was he working on? Who’s he, you know, interacting with? So I feel like you can kind of gauge
So I think you just have to know kind of if you’re running for a thriller audience. And they want that bigger scale. How can you take
[00:15:53] Matty: Yeah, I really like the idea of using, playing with tropes as a way of sort of, injecting new energy or a new spin into something. I think this is a good way of illustrating how tropes are different than cliches and I. I can especially see this and I’m curious for your opinions on this, for obvious reasons in how this plays out in a series because, you’ve written about series.
I think in one of our last conversations we talked about series and I would think that. You know, every people who are writing longer series, probably everybody gets to the point where like, Ugh, like I’ve done it all. I dunno what to do next. And it would be super fun to just like pick up the big book of the big trope thesaurus, you know, the big general trope thesaurus from Jen, and just start paging through it and saying like, oh, you know, enemies to lovers.
Well, I wasn’t really thinking about this as having a, a romance subplot, but how else can it play out? Like you’re saying, it doesn’t have to be lovers, it could be friends. and I’m curious as to whether you have ever used the tropes of mystery in that way, like using them as a tool to look at a story differently, or if you would now, going forward, now that you’ve written the book with Jen.
[00:17:04] Sara: Oh yeah, I think I will now much more than I did in the past because once you start seeing them, you know, you become more familiar with ’em and you’re like, oh, look at how this book or this TV show is, is using this trope that I hadn’t even thought of before. But yeah, I think I’ve done that in the past.
Well, there’s, you know, the locked room trope, and I decided one time I just, I want to write this book with a locked room mystery. Like that was my starting point. I think it would be interesting to take like locked room and say, how else could I have a locked room? I actually, I was brainstorming my, with my husband about this one time.
I was like, what can, what new thing can you do with locked room? And then I thought, you know what? If you had a story where. The room was locked, but you had to get something into the locked room instead of getting something outta locked room. You know, just like something like that, you could just take it and say, how can we change this up a little
How can we make it the same but different? You know? Because if readers want that familiarity, that’s why they like tropes. But you need a little something different to give it a little more sparkle, a little more interest, you know?
[00:18:13] Matty: I, I think that’s fantastic. When you, you started saying that I thought that the spin was going to be, it’s not a room, it’s a, it’s a. Ship or it’s a basket hanging from a balloon or something like that. But I like that idea of it’s not in the room, it’s, it’s out of the room and has to get in the room. That’s super
[00:18:31] Sara: Yeah. And to me that’s almost has thriller elements to it, right? Because like a, like a bank heist. What if you had a, a reverse bank heist where you know, you need to get something back into the safety deposit box without anybody finding out about it, you know? And you could still have all the, you know, the building the team and the, the planning.
And then you have things go wrong. You could still do the same pattern, you know, but you would just be, your goal would be different.
[00:18:56] Matty: It would be fun to find a work in a completely different genre that was known for like, hitting all the beats of its genre, beats tropes, like the, the conventions of that genre and say, okay, that’s a romance, but I’m going to write, you know, an urban fantasy based on that. Or I’m going to write a, a western based on it, or
and see how, how well you can match the. Match that kind of rhythm, but in a different genre and with a different set of tropes probably.
[00:19:27] Sara: Or you could take something and say, I’m going to write this. I mean, I don’t think there’s a market for this right now, but maybe someday I’m going to write this as a time travel mystery. I’m going to take the mystery elements and put them into a time travel story and see what happens. Add that element of time, travel or something like that, that you know, it’s just.
Would, it makes my brain go, oh, how would that work? How can I fit all
[00:19:53] Matty: I think the other reason that I find it very useful to look at lists of tropes for a certain genre is that I’m assuming there must be other writers out here out there like me that have a lot of trouble recognizing. Tropes in their own work. If you don’t go into it thinking that you’re going to use a trope.
So for example, I was thinking about locked room mystery. I think in one of the previous conversations I mentioned, I said that’s one of the few circumstances where every once in a while I’m like, as a reader looking for a particular trope. Like I’m in the mood for a locked room mystery and
but I don’t generally write. I don’t think of it in that way when I’m writing and for example, I’m writing, a story now based on a cruise ship. And so it’s like the limited group of people who have limited access to the outside world and bad things are about to happen. And I thought, oh yeah, that’s definitely a trope.
But I wasn’t going into it thinking that way. And so I, my fear is that I’m under utilizing the potential of that trope by not thinking about
[00:21:00] Sara: Yes. And I think I’ve noticed that the, since I’ve worked on this book, I can see them so much easier. Things that I hadn’t noticed before that, , because we, we traded our manuscripts. Like we each, we divvied up all the tropes and wrote everything. We each took half, then we traded and read each other’s stuff.
And I’ve tried to, you know, catch all the tropes. When Jennifer sent stuff back, she was like, Hey, did you realize this is a TR here and this is TR here? And I was like, oh, no, I totally missed it. You know? Oh, that, that is a con. I didn’t understand that. The, you know, I just didn’t pick up on it. So I think it takes, you know, somebody else
this might be something that you could use AI for. Just say, what are the tropes in here, the major tropes, and let me know, you know, give me a list because. AI’s good at analyzing big chunks of data that, I mean, some people don’t want to use it at all for anything, but I think this would be something that it, it would be a good like sort of supportive
And once you see it, then you can go, oh, like I had a, a lot of mysteries, you have the dead body is found and then for some reason. You have this clock that’s ticking. Jennifer calls this the ticking time bomb. And I always think that’s more of a thriller trope. You know, it’s more, you know, we have to save the world, you know, before you know the, the tragedy happens, but you can use it in mystery if you have
Sometimes it’s like, oh, you know, the, the feds are arriving. In a day, you have one evening to gather as much information as you possibly can to solve this yourself before you have to hand it off or I’ve, there was a mystery I watched one time where the law was changing and the, statutes of limitation was about to expire, and these people were like, okay, if we can find this one final clue, we can put together this case and we can file the charges before the deadline so you can create
In your mystery too, even though I feel like ticking time bomb is more, it’s more frequently used in thrillers or I recognize it faster in thrillers, you know? So there are probably lots of things like that that I just don’t see. But yeah, there are lots that I think familiarity and going over it and having somebody else look at it is probably the
[00:23:25] Matty: Yeah, well a couple of years ago, Jen and I had this, short video series where we would watch movies and then we would get together and talk about the tropes in the movies. I’ll put a link to that. That, playlist on YouTube in the show notes. but you’re absolutely right that seeing that, play out in other, in other works like movies for example, is, is really fun.
[00:23:48] Matty: is, are there tips you have for people or, going to, Things other than books, TVs, or shows or movies, things like that. Like is there some little part of their brain they can turn on so that they’re learning optimally from the tropes they’re seeing and maybe
[00:24:03] Sara: Sometimes, I will read a book or watch a show and I just enjoy it. I just. Watch it and enjoy it. And then if I really, if it was one of the ones that I’m like, sort of fascinated with, I’m thinking, I really enjoyed that. How did they make that work? You know, like, how, how did they make that, I want to go back and I’ll watch it again, read it again, and I’ll go slower and I’ll look for patterns
yeah. So that’s what I did when I did these, all these examples. I would watch the show and then I’d think, okay, what were the, the. What could I match up to this list that we have? That was very helpful. , because I was like, at least this is a starting point, and then maybe
But then a lot of times I would think, okay. What, like if I’m going to do, you were saying a, like they’re all on a cruise ship that’s forced proximity, so they’re all together. What other shows use forced proximity and it could be on a train, it could be they’re, you know, walk somewhere because of a natural disaster and then just go watch how, because you know, there’s infinite variety of ways you can do things.
[00:25:18] Matty: Yeah. I also wanted to loop back on something you had said earlier about,using the examination of tropes along with ai. And one of the other favors that Jen did for me is that I was reworking the sales descriptions of my thriller series. And I had drafted something and I sent it out to a circle of friends, including Jen and asking for input, and she said.
You should also ask the AI to identify the tropes that exist in the story. And so I did that and you know, at the end I would say it would be like perfect for readers who love fill in the blank. And, one of the things that is very, very central to my thriller series, but I had not
And so I was able to call out the found family concept in the marketing material. And to me that was just one of those things, like I had just written it into the story, but I had never analyzed it from that point of view about what expectation or what trope is that feeding and would
[00:26:18] Sara: Yes. I think that’s invaluable because we’re so close to it, it’s so hard to see. And when you get that. Outside view of it. I do find those things for me too. I’m like, oh, that is a friends to lovers subplot, that that’s just what I have in the series. That’s how I’m, you know, it’s that storyline that’s carrying out across the series among the, the two main characters.
But in my mind, that’s just the, this thing, I didn’t identify it as a trope, which once you do that, you can include that in the description
[00:26:52] Matty: Yeah, the, the conversation about making, making a little twist on a trope reminds me, I think that, I’m going to say Stephen King, but everything gets attributed to Stephen King, so I’m not sure this is true, but the idea that,taking things and changing one aspect of it. Like, let’s, let’s do truckers on the road encounter, you know, encounter something dangerous.
But what if we put them in space instead and now it’s aliens. I. I just think that that’s such a great sort of palate, cleanser, and especially when people are stuck and they might feel like they’re stuck because of the tropes that they feel like they need to hit. But if you think of it as a menu and, and look at some other genres, tropes, just like you were saying, and, see how people are playing with them there.
[00:27:37] Sara: Yeah. Yeah. It sort of like the, DIE HARD except on a plane, DIE HARD, except in the White House. You know, there are infinite variety of shows and movies and books that have been played off of that, that trope, you know, that, that situation,
[00:27:51] Matty: Exactly. Um,
[00:27:58] Matty: one of the things you had mentioned was the idea of why international mysteries should be on your watch list and your, to be read list. Talk a little bit about that. Why would international
[00:28:05] Sara: Well, for me, part of the reason I started watching, you know, and reading these other literature and TV shows from other countries is I feel like our entertainment in the US has gotten mo very dark and kind of gritty in many ways. A lot of the mysteries are,
You get rid of the network shows and then. People are drawn to this. I think the producers of them are drawn to the more dramatic, the gritty, the darker, the more hard hitting. And if you’re a cozy mystery writer, you’re like, oh, what am I going to watch? There’s no more, WHITE COLLAR,
She wrote, where am I going to go? But there is a lot of lighter entertainment. Around the world. And I, that’s where I’ve found a lot of the lighter shows. A lot of the lighter mystery shows, British and French especially. I love those. The Scandi stuff is still very dark, so, but they do have a couple of cozy, like cozy mysteries.
So for me it was like seeking out changes, more entertainment in the tone that I enjoy. And so that was kind of how I got started in it. And just, I feel like watching these shows, they have a different. Especially the Asian shows. I watch a lot of K-dramas, Korean dramas, Japanese dramas. They have a different type of structure because they
Unending series, they, they have a 10 episode, 10 a limited series. They have 10 episodes, they have 16 episodes, and you get the whole story arc and you get character arcs. Whereas in our shows, a lot of times the ideas that this series is going to go on as long as possible, so our characters. Are always going to be the same way because they can’t really complete their growth arc because then the series ends.
What do you do with them? So I enjoy those because you get to see the whole character arc. You get to see the whole plot line play out, and you get a resolution instead of the season one ends up on a cliffhanger. And then you come back in season two and then all of a sudden you’re
They kinda do a reset until you get to the end of the season, and then there’s a cliffhanger. But I feel like there’s not that progressive growth that you get to see in some of these series. I find them really satisfying and I’ve found that they, they just do some interesting
One of the I, I get some story possibilities from them. Like I watched one, it is called MURDER BY THE LAKE, and there’s another series called MURDER AT THE LAKE or something like that. So you have to really search
[00:30:39] Matty: There’s the murder trope and the lake trope.
[00:30:42] Sara: they put ’em together. Yeah. But this one, it
I think it was, Germany and Austria both border on this lake. And so if something, if a crime happened in the lake, then you know, they needed this multi got multi-country team to investigate. So that was interesting, just the different dynamics involved there and the different. Ways of doing things and you know, the inner office politics, you know, that come with that.
But then each mystery, I was amazed at how many mysteries they came up with. That happened on that lake. , because everything had to happen in the lake. So, you know, you got, you know, boat desk, you’ve got different disappearances. But it was, I can’t remember them all now, but I remember watching it thinking, wow, look at all these varieties of
And then. One of the characters, her backstory had to do with the lake, and so it was like, it’s like a theme you can layer in as well as like the situation. So I dunno, just things like that I’ve just found very interesting. And I don’t know that I would’ve come across some of recommendation queue, you know?
[00:31:52] Matty: Yeah.
[00:31:54] Matty: I imagine most of our listeners are in the us. do you find, or did you get any sense as you ma made these ventures into your recommendation queue about to what extent people who are writing with. Audiences outside the US audience in mind need to take tropes into account? Like are tropes sort of international or are you seeing in your, in your viewing that different markets are treating them in
[00:32:23] Sara: No, I feel like they’re pretty international. I feel like the, Mike Sherlock Holmes, the great detective trope is pretty international. You know, I feel like there’s the, you know, different varieties of it. I did watch a, a Korean drama, called FLEX X COP. And they had one episode where they were like, oh, it’s a locked room
And I was like, you are kidding. But it wasn’t really a locked room mystery, but they wanted to throw that in because people, you know, recognize that, Japanese, I haven’t run across, I’ve been told that Japanese love locked room mysteries and the access to Japanese content isn’t as. Wide, you know, they’re harder to find with the subtitles
So I haven’t been able to watch any of those, but I’ve heard that they really love them. They have a lot of books that have been translated into English that have the locked room trope. So I think you can probably find out what people enjoy by looking at the, the content that that’s really popular in those countries, the types of shows they
yeah, that’s, those are the main ones that I’ve noticed is like the great detective. Odd couple pairing that seems to be popular wherever you go. Especially if you’ve got, you know, the, like a police detective and a consulting, some sort of, you know, variety of consultant, you know, working together.
And there are different personalities and they have different skillsets
[00:33:47] Matty: It does sort of seem like going back to what you were saying before about there are levels, like you were talking about, applying things that you think of as thriller tropes to mystery and the the. Example I thought of that. I, I originally thought of it in terms of, is this different market to market?
But I don’t think it is. I think it’s more different reader to reader is like the ticking time bomb. That, that definitely sounds like thriller. But if you think of it as the, the ticking clock or the sand, you know, sifting through the hourglass or something like that, it’s all the same idea, but you’re, you’re leading into it to different, in
To meet the needs of whatever readers you’re trying to attract.
[00:34:31] Sara: Yeah, and having some limits, time limits on, whatever you’re doing, whether it’s a, you know, save the world thriller or an investigation, it keeps the pace up. It helps you keep, keep things moving, which is great.
[00:34:44] Matty: Well, so I don’t, impose too much on your time and keeping the pacing up. Sara, it’s always fun to talk to you and, being able to combine tropes and series is super fun since you obviously, have expertise in both. And I know people are going to be interested in checking out the new book from you and Jennifer Hilt, so please let people know where they can go to find out more about that,
[00:35:06] Sara: Okay, well for me it’s SaraRosett.com and they have all my books are listed there. There’s a link to the series book and to the trope book and the Cozy Industry book. All that’s online and my website, and I’ll also give you a link that will go directly to the trope book for Jennifer and I. So it’s been great to catch up with you.