By Cora Kenborn

Billionaire. BDSM Dominate. Marriage of Convenience. Love Triangle. Sports Hero. Motorcycle Club. Stepbrother. Forbidden Love. Secret babies. Frenemies.

You know them, you read them, you love them, you hate them; sometimes you love to hate them. Maybe even sometimes you want one of them to die a slow and painful death, never to return again to a single page.

But what are they?

Tropes. Simply put, they are recycled clichés the romance genre uses to get the main characters to their happily (or a recent trend, “not-so-happily”) ever after. As authors, we spent countless hours trying to keep our tropes fresh and unique—adding that special spin or “oomph” all our own to make it stand out above all other tropes in romance land.

Webster’s Dictionary defines trope as: a word, phrase, or image used in a new and different way in order to create an artistic effect…