Fantasy Tropes: A Guide for Writers
by Mary Kole | Former literary agent, now a freelance editor, writing teacher, and IP/story developer for major publishers and creators.
Fantasy writers have centuries of fantasy tropes to experiment with when they’re sitting down to write their novels. From classic tales like The Lord of the Rings to more modern works such as Percy Jackson, the fantasy genre continues to captivate readers with its unique worldbuilding and imaginative characters. Anything is possible in fantasy, so here are some popular fantasy tropes to add to your writing repertoire.
Fantasy Tropes: The Hero’s Journey
The hero’s journey is one of the most common fantasy tropes that writers use. It’s a timeless structure and is based on Joseph Campbell’s work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The basic framework follows a hero as they go on an adventure that usually involves facing various challenges and enemies, getting support, and emerging as a more mature main character with a reinforced protagonist personality. Along their journey, the hero will often have help from allies or mentors. The hero’s story usually ends with them defeating the villain or enemy and returning home victorious. Their new position in their community is one of the hallmarks of fantasy tropes that use the Hero’s Journey concept.
It’s important to note that readers are likely to bond with an underdog character, so give your Hero’s Journey character something to prove, a strong objective and a clear wound or need.
Fantasy Tropes: The Chosen One
The Chosen One narrative is one of the most commonly used fantasy tropes. It involves a character discovering that they have some special powers or abilities that make them uniquely qualified to fight against evil forces or save their world from destruction, for example. These characters are often prophesied about or chosen by fate to fulfill an important mission—one that only they can complete for specific reasons.
If you want to work with fantasy tropes, including the chosen one, make sure you make it fresh. Readers will be familiar with this plotline, so find any way you can to make it unique, including a new power, an interesting origin story for the character or their ancestors, or a new way in which the world might end if the character is not successful.
Most importantly, this is one of those fantasy tropes that needs to make sense. Why would the FBI hire a child spy? There needs to be a reason that passes the sniff test. Bonus points if you can make your character vulnerabilities the reason they’ll end up triumphant.
Fantasy Tropes: Good vs Evil
The conflict of good vs. evil is a thematic staple of fantasy books—and it underpins a lot of fantasy tropes. This makes the protagonist and antagonist very clear—one is on the side of moral good, and one is on the side of moral evil. The battle between moral ideals of light and darkness is as old as time.
This idea stands out in the pantheon of fantasy tropes, and gives readers someone easy to root for (the good guys) while also providing interesting villains to make things more exciting. After all, we have a dark side in us, as well as a good side. If you mix both light and darkness in your main character, your story will rise above those that use more straightforward fantasy tropes.
Good versus evil can be seen in almost every type of fantasy book, whether it’s high fantasy featuring wizards and dragons, sword and sorcery novels set in medieval times, or even modern day urban fantasies (which tend to feature paranormal creatures like vampires and werewolves).
Keep in mind that there are fantasy tropes for different kinds of fantasies as well. Fantasy books provide readers an escape into another world filled with heroes, villains, magic, and adventure—and these elements are often expressed through fantasy tropes that can be bent and shaped in unlimited directions.
As you write your own fantasy novel, consider how fantasy tropes might fit into your story to create a deeper connection with your readers. After all, it's these common threads that will draw people into your story again and again.
This post contains affiliate links.
Elevate Your Storytelling
Wherever you are in your writing journey—from an initial outline to a draft to pitching your project—the experienced team at Good Story Editing can take your work to the next level.