User blog comment:TDIwriter/Two Years of TDIwriter/@comment-12.155.83.2-20110220042916/@comment-1874924-20110221040745

TV Tropes is a wiki-format website that catalogs "tricks of the trade" for writing fiction. A "trope", in this context, is a storytelling convention--any storytelling convention--that the writer can reasonably expect the audience to be familiar with, whether it be a matter of story development, characterization, narrative style, or linguistic idiom. Writers uses tropes with the expectation that the audience will be familiar with them and/or expect to see them. Tropes can be played straight or played with, i.e. subverted, exaggerated, deconstructed, etc.

The TV Tropes website (originally TV-specific, but now concerned with other media as well) defines a "trope" more broadly as any recognizable pattern in a genre of fictional work. This broader definition includes things that can appear in a work unintentionally and damage the work in the process (e.g. the Mary Sue and her subspecies, to cite one example of many).

On a related note, in one of my upcoming LTDI previews, I am planning to include a listing of tropes that I've identified in my story. Not counting those that come with the territory in TD-style stories and its canon characters, I have identified over 60 tropes so far.