✨Literary Horoscopes for Pisces Season🐟

Dare we say….written….in the stars? ✨✨

Pisces

How Much of These Hills Is Gold meets There, There. Don’t lose your library card this month. The thing about the emperor’s new clothes was that he felt damned fine in them until that meddling kid came along. Do you, Pisces.

Tropes to avoid: Only in America, It was all a dream.

Tropes to embrace: Anti-hero, Quest

Genre of the month: Young Adult

Aries

Mrs. Dalloway meets White Is for Witching. Persevere and breathe deeply. Paper cuts are a concern this month—keep it digital.

Tropes to avoid: Love triangle, Actually a ghost.

Tropes to embrace: Seeking counsel from a mysterious mentor, Final girl.

Genre of the month: Cozy mystery

Taurus

Lucky Us meets The Vanishing Half. Say it with your body. If you are Wallace Stevens, don’t quit the bank just yet.

Tropes to avoid: Hero’s journey, Detective with a dead wife.

Tropes to embrace: Forbidden love, Nothing to lose.

Genre of the month: Literary fiction

Gemini

The God of Small Things meets Enchanted April. Stay hydrated. If you’re Shirley Jackson, you’ll sell a few stories to “Science Fiction” this month.

Tropes to avoid: Free-spirited relative can’t be relied upon; Life is ultimately pointless.

Tropes to embrace: Love at first sight; Chekhov’s gun.

Genre of the month: New Adult

Cancer

Family Meal meets Moby Dick. Pack light and leave a forwarding address. If your pen runs out of ink, remember that stories written on sand count, too.

Tropes to avoid: You can’t go home again, Ancient secrets discovered.

Tropes to embrace: Minority morality saves the day.

Genre of the month: LGBTQ Fiction

Leo

Black Cake meets Empire of Wild. Don’t take stock tips from salesmen. If you’ve never listened to the wind roll over the desert, perhaps now is the time.

Tropes to avoid: Inexplicably gifted at a very particular task, Small business vs. huge conglomerate.

Tropes to embrace: Returning home upon the death of a parent, Answer was inside me all along.

Genre of the month: Fantasy

Virgo

Love in the Time of Cholera meets The Fraud. Spreadsheets make terrible compasses. If six characters show up in search of their author, hit the bar and leave the house to them.

Trope to avoid: City mouse country mouse, Locked room mystery.

Tropes to embrace: Enemies to lovers, Learning to appreciate difference.

Genre of the month: Modernist fiction

Libra

Les Misérables meets Less. Hedge every bet this month. Fortune’s wheel can always bring you back home.

Tropes to avoid: Day before retirement, Savior is in actuality a villain.

Tropes to embrace: Werewolves.

Genre of the month: Upmarket commercial fiction

Scorpio

Eat Love Pray meets Glory. Break your mirrors for good luck this month. If you’ve ever considered writing a novel skewering white America’s fetish for stories of Black trauma, now might be the time.

Tropes to avoid: Dual timelines, Trapped in an elevator.

Tropes to embrace: My enemy is me, Chosen one.

Genre of the month: Science fiction

Sagittarius

Mrs. Caliban meets The Sentence. Don’t look your shadow in the eye. Your darlings are seductive, but falling in love with them now will only cause anguish in the edit.

Tropes to avoid: Forbidden love, Body switches.

Tropes to embrace: Man in the mirror, Contest prize can solve all problems. 

Genre of the month: Romance

Capricorn

My Sister, The Serial Killer meets Quicksand. Cake on the SPF45+. Your cult leader index has never been higher, but cult leaders have historically written terrible books. 

Tropes to avoid: Cliffhanger, Fake relationship, Rules of this school

Tropes to embrace: Unreliable narrator, MacGuffin.

Genre of the month: Magical realism

Aquarius

The Secret History meets The Star Side of Bird Hill. Buckle your damn seat belt. As Gertrude Stein said, moving is in every direction. As Ferris Bueller said, life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Tropes to avoid: Bad guy with the heart of gold, Discovering secret powers, Historical homosexuals.

Tropes to embrace: Coming of age, Opening with a dream.

Genre of the month: Historical fiction

From Allison:

What a bunch of lovely tropes! I’ve been thinking of tropes lately—how useful they are, how they build a relationship with reader expectations, how they’re such a part of the conversation we’re all having through our stories. And how, sometimes, we might resist the ones that feel overused or formulaic to us, but sometimes they’re common because they are doing something useful–we can study the function to find our own different way.

I’ve also been going deep into intuitive logic and strange combinations. So what happens if you pick three tropes from this list and stir them together? Can you make something strange happen?

Try This:

How might your character look for meaning in nonsense, or depth in whimsy? And how might that search give your reader more to chew on?

IMPROMPT2 is a project of writers Erin Kate Ryan and Allison Wyss.