Look Deeper

So, I'm always talking about playing with tropes, and I try a little to explain how you can turn a classic idea on its head, but you can still end up falling into traps.

If you take a classic story and change the colors, you haven't done something new. If you have the classic knight saving the beautiful princess by slaying the dragon, but you make it an Amazon warrior saving the foppish prince, you end up with the exact same story. There may be a little novelty in your change, but nothing core.

If you switch the roles of the characters, you can come up with interesting mutations. In the current example, you can have an effeminate protagonist that ends up being browbeaten into saving a burly captor from a dragon, which would definitely be different enough to consider. You could alternatively have the fearsome dragon go forth to slay the bloodthirsty human to save the rest of the dragons, which is a bigger twist of roles, but has probably been done far more often.

In reality, the best way to make any of these story ideas more interesting is to look deeper. Look for the motivations beyond the obvious. Probe into the histories of your characters. Don't make the story one-sided. Especially when you have simpler story concepts, the more you switch around roles or details, the more they end up just being different colors on the same house.

Just about every story can be made more interesting by examining them more closely. There is always a limit, and the number one rule is always how well the story moves, but if things are too light, this is how you add valuable weight.