You can’t have coffee with a writer, editor or agent for long without the words “meme” or “trope” bouncing into the conversation. For my non-writerly friends, here are the defs.
I meme it!
Meme rhymes with “dream.” Memes, like dreams, cover a lot of territory. The word meme was invented by a British scientist, Richard Dawkins, in the late 1970s. He created it to explain how commonly held ideas, slang, innovations, prejudices, beliefs, etc. take hold, spread and evolve.
A meme, he says, is an idea or belief common to a culture; it becomes common because it’s shared among people by way of the written or spoken word, and/or other forms of communication (body language, gesture, etc.) “Examples of memes,” according to Dawkins, include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. . . . memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via . . . imitation.”
Outside of literature, the term meme has become attached to Internet phenomena – Twitter trends and YouTube videos that “go viral,” for example. In this sense, a meme defines itself as a form of communication that captures significant attention from an audience. Here’s Mashable’s list of the Top Internet Memes of 2009, for example.
Abandon all trope, ye who enter here – or maybe not
A trope (rhymes with “hope”) is a recurring theme (also called a pattern or a motif) in literature. Tropes are drawn from characters, settings, or plot. Example: Common tropes in fantasy fiction include the archvillain (character), an enchanted land (setting), and a quest (plot). TVtropes.org has a fun list of many recurring tv tropes.
For writers, tropes are a reminder that there is rarely anything new under the literary sun – but that execution is what matters. One writer’s magical land trope is the countertop with a toaster who talks, the other’s is Hogwarts.
(And, just to confuse matters a little, trope also means “a figure of speech” – similes, metaphors, and such. However, in coffee house land, “trope” is generally reserved for literary themes.)
Caffe Reggio (above) is the oldest coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village. Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley have all sipped java here. Photo of Caffe Reggio by wallyg.
