‘A space in which language can play and find itself’ – talking about slow discovery writing with poet Rishi Dastidar @BetaRish

In some ways, writers of literary fiction (and non-fiction) are like poets. Our materials are shapes, images, emotions and sounds; our landscape is a reader’s mind. When we start a work, we might not know where it will take us, just that there is something it wants to be. I’m delighted to have a poet here to talk about that – Rishi Dastidar, who has written two poetry collections and edited several more. He has also edited a craft guide for poets. We talk about capturing ideas without killing them, and how a process can turn a fragment of nonsense into something original, sophisticated and surprising.

Let’s start with a quick guide to Rishi.

Over-caffeinated writer for hire, residing in south London, with a penchant for supporting less-than-successful sports teams, who when not wielding a pen for brands or art tries to keep two cats happy.

How poetry start for you?

I started writing in 2007, after a chance encounter with Ashes for Breakfast, by Durs Grünbein, translated by Michael Hofmann. I had a damascene moment if that isn’t too grand – I discovered *the* thing I wanted to write. Now, I had no idea that I could write it (I hadn’t studied literature) so I enrolled in a beginner’s course at City Lit that week, and I’ve been plugging away ever since.

You’re the editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century – tell me about that.

That was at the instigation of my editor at Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane. She’s been publishing a series of handbooks for poets, designed to inspire and provide support on the journey to becoming a poet – a journey without a destination if ever there was one, perhaps. We felt there was space for a book for those who had been writing for a while and wanted to go deeper into writing poetry, and to consider issues of ‘craft’.

‘Craft’ in inverted commas?

It is quite a loaded term. What is it? Who is defining it? Why is it important? Why is it important to the person defining it? The word has been used, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes not, as a form of soft gatekeeping, that hard-to-speak-of space where quality and elitism are hard to tell apart.

We wanted to explore that in the book, as well as technical aspects of different forms: how to maximise the potential of your voice; how to bring digital technology to your poems if you want; the ethics of truth-telling and using real life in your work… providing poets with insights into the ‘craft’ that go beyond thinking about pentameter, but rather the full gamut of what you have to think about to make your work the best it can possibly be. The real joy of the book was commissioning essays from so many writers I love and look up to, then getting the heck out of the way as they delivered their wisdom.

You have two collections of poetry Ticker-tape from 2017 and Saffron Jack from 2020. What unifies each collection?

It’s hard, at least initially, to discern much unity between the two. Ticker-tape is more of a debut collection with all its unevenness and flaws, to go with its brio and energy. Saffron Jack can be a read as a long poem about one man’s attempt to set up his own country as a response to feeling alienated from where he is. There’s a third in the works, which will hopefully arrive in 2023.

I suppose what brings everything together is a style, or more precisely a tone. It’s one that’s quite antic, not that many moments for pauses or calm reflections. I generally try to cram my lyrics with a lot – that slightly uncomfortable feeling of the poem teetering on the edge of falling out of coherence. Neologisms abound: I’m a magpie for picking up and throwing in phrases that look and sound like jargon, and then seeing what happens when you put them in a poetic context.

Tell me more about that.

I like taking language from economics, advertising, politics and seeing what happens when you bend them out of shape. Does it reveal there is something more substantial to them? Can you find the thought that might have animated them? What does that reveal?

I’m aware that makes me sound like I live at my desk and behind my screen. While that is mostly true, there’s generally always something that snares me when I’m out walking through London. I’m very urban in that regard. The city leaks into everything I write.

How does a poem come to you?

I generally wait and see what a phrase starts to suggest to me. I’ll capture something that snags me: a hesitant attempt at describing an image; something stolen from an article, a headline, overheard; some mucking around with different words on my desk. Then I hope that something starts to cohere and make… I was about to type ‘sense’, and that’s not quite right, as I’m not necessarily interested in a sense of logic, but rather a sense of suggestiveness.

For example, I have the phrase right now ‘cardinal reminiscence bump’ in front of me on my desk. To others, I know this will appear meaningless babble. To me, I see *something* in that formulation: perhaps the hurt that a difficult memory brings back, perhaps the primary thing that I was meant to remember today; perhaps what it feels like to meet an past lover for the first time in 11 years. The point being: something around the phrase is inviting me to explore, delve further, find out what it might be saying to me.

I get that. The tweak in the soul, a primal sense of meaning.

Of course, not every poem – especially commissions – arrives like that, but broadly speaking I have to try to hold open a space in which language can play and start to find itself. I can then just be the recorder of it, at least in the early drafts. The more it gets whipped into shape, the more it bears some imprint that is recognisably me.

You’re obviously a person who travels with a notebook (or e-notebook)… but a note can look alien later. When I work with an idea I often feel I’m catching up with something that wants me to understand it, and sometimes its moment goes cold. How do you write down ideas to preserve their energy?

I actually don’t mind the alien-ness of looking at my scribbles. Sometimes reading them is enough to take me back to the moment and the energy that was there when the phrase was captured; more often than not it’s not… and that’s okay. Hopefully the phrase will suggest *something* and I’m not so concerned what that something is – I need it to reveal itself as I work, bring it together with other scribbles, say, then see what is released in those juxtapositions and collisions. I generally trust that something new will emerge from the process, and new is good for me; I can work with that, make it better.

I’m interested in the similarities of writing literary fiction and poetry, especially the long process of refining and perfecting, which I relish. Sometimes that’s about mechanics – giving the reader necessary information such as back story or character reactions. Sometimes it’s tuning the moment in a particular way. All of it is feeling the way to guide the reader’s mind. I’ll go through a scene hundreds of times when the book is rough, and in the later stages, as I understand the book as a whole, I will probably change it many more times again. Yet I never feel that work is wasted or that I’m draining the book of life. And there comes a time when it’s all done – and I know it is. I can read the whole thing and it works as it should. 

Yes, absolutely. Frustratingly, I haven’t developed very sophisticated language to describe what this stage of drafting a poem is like for me. My best stab is to say, to myself and others: trust your Spidey sense.

There is a very real risk that you can overwork a poem into inertness, and that would destroy the thing that makes my poems my poems, the innate sense of energy. Of course, I’ve had to train my Spidey sense over the years, and learn to trust to it, to know when the 17th draft is a charm, but the 18th has killed the poem.

And that makes it sound like work when of course it’s not – there is absolutely a pleasure to be had in this kind of puzzle solving.

Puzzle solving! Yes.

Cutting a word to sharpen an image, changing a line ending to release a different sound or idea.

To release a different sound or idea… yes, that’s the reward. When you’ve found the right tuning.  

You will almost definitely see different things on different passes, so you should allow the time for this part of the process. Poems have to live in the dark, of the bottom of desk drawers, maturing, until they tug at you, wanting to be seen again, tweaked a bit more. But then you have to intervene and tell them they’re ready, otherwise they never will be.

When you hand a collection to an editor, how does the process work?

I’m very fortunate to have been working with Jane at Nine Arches for a while now, as she gets completely whatever I’m trying to do with my voice and within any given book project.

How does one edit poetry? What kind of notes would an editor give?

You can think of it as working on two levels.

First the higher one: what is the collection trying to do? Are the right poems there to do that? What order do they need to go in to do that? Have you left enough space for the reader to bring themselves into the worlds you are creating?

Generally you have more poems than you need or some aren’t ready, so a lot of is it leaving stuff on the cutting room floor and then re-arranging. I trust Jane implicitly, as she has an excellent ability to spot the poems I haven’t yet accepted aren’t ready, though I know deep down.

And the second level?

That’s the micro-work on the poems themselves. Are your titles right? Is your syntax secure? Are your rhymes subtle or clanging, by intention rather than by accident? Is your punctuation in the right place? How do the poems sound when you read them out and they hit the air? Are your line endings surprising?

This is your second mention of line endings. In prose, I pay a lot of attention to line endings; the thought a sentence lands on, where that takes the reader next.

If the previous process was the sledgehammer, this is the scalpel – fine-grained fine-tuning which, if you do it well enough, should be all but invisible to the reader.

Invisible to the reader – that’s it. I once heard Michael Caine talk about his work process. He was asked how he gave such relaxed performances. He said: ‘the rehearsal is the work; the performance is the relaxation’. (I wrote about it here.)

And you definitely need outside help at this point, as you will have been looking at them for so long, you won’t be able to spot the faults.

How do you improve your own craft?

Boring cliche answer, but cliches have that boring habit of bring true:

First, reading – as much as I can, of any stripe style or hue. Rare is the weekend that I am not in a bookshop at some point, and I have to-be-read bookcases rather than piles. And it’s not just poetry: I think poets can learn from the rhythms of prose.

I do the other way round. I keep poetry volumes on my desk to loosen up my thinking, stop me being too literal.

I also love immersing myself in a narrative, not least because it remains a thing of wonder to me that anyone can write 50,000 words of a story and make it coherent and make sense.

The second element is experimenting – consciously trying to change things up and get out of a rut.

I hope you’ll give examples…

Can I edit this draft harder?

Can I edit this draft weirder?

What can I change to make it feel still me but not me?

What forms haven’t I tried yet? Why? Can I run towards them?

I’m finding that I need to develop that sort of intentionality to keep things fresh and shake things up. I’m writing a lot of prose gobbets at the moment, short bursts of 100-200 words. Will all the experiments work? No, but in trying I’ll find something new.

As a change of gear, you’re also a copywriter, journalist and brand strategist. Many of us have day jobs that use our word talents – I edit on a medical magazine. It’s factual, precise and pragmatic. I find there are curious ways this refreshes my creative work – unexpected sources of inspiration from the ‘real’ world, of course, but also the practicality is a good antidote to the limitless possibilities of creativity. How do your other areas of work complement your work as a poet?

Hugely: primarily at a level of discipline. I have to finish a response to a client brief by a deadline, so I can’t hang around waiting for inspiration. So I have learned to be directed in my thinking and my messing around; leaving enough space to be broad in exploring before narrowing in on what the answer might be, and doing so rapidly.

I’ve got good at knowing how to fill gaps, and that translates into a level of confidence in knowing that I can get from A to B in a poem and make it look like I know what I’m doing, even if perhaps I don’t at anything other than a subconscious level.

Also, being in the world of brands and branding is good for seeing how cultural trends, commercial decisions and organisations collide with each other. You get to see how the modern world is shaped. More than that, you get lots of insight into humans and their motivations: what people are buying, what people are wishing for, how they’re collaborating with each other, how they’re interacting with technology, how they are working. Being able to observe – and sometimes influence – some of that has been a real privilege, and must have leached into what I write about. It’s certainly more interesting than my life as a subject matter.

What should I ask you next?

Why do I have so many baseball caps, and why can’t I have a more rock-and-roll mid-life crisis?

Find Rishi on Twitter @BetaRish and find his books on Nine Arches Press

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Have you missed an important scene out of your story?

We’ve probably all had a note in a critique that tells us we’ve failed to include an important scene. Eg – ‘We know these characters well and have seen their lives in close detail. When the cousins died in that boating accident, where was the funeral scene? What about the period where the family adjusts to the tragedy?’ (Indeed, that’s not just a missing scene; it’s an entire story thread.)

Sometimes this happens because, well, we were concentrating on a million other plot developments. We do a lot of dumb, impulsive things when we can’t see the wood for the trees. The omission only becomes apparent when we give the book to a reader who isn’t lost in the forest of book decisions. And the easiest remedy is:

Replace it with something less drastic
Well of course it is. Ask yourself: why did you include the event? Was it only to bring some characters together? To show passage of time? Brainstorm some other solutions that will be less disruptive.

The second option is to embrace the disruption, drop the bomb and enjoy mopping up.

So…
So far, so obvious. But sometimes, the workings of the writer’s heart are more complicated – especially first-time authors who aren’t yet confident with story-wrangling. They might have the gut instinct that it’s ‘right’ for the cousins to die. But something stops them writing the scenes that explore the aftermath. When I’ve seen this, I’ve found there are two main reasons. (And here are the remedies.)

They feel unequal to the challenge
We all worry from time to time that we won’t do justice to a tricky scene or issue, especially if it’s beyond our own personal experience. But that isn’t an excuse to dodge our duty to the reader.

If we don’t feel we can tackle a situation authoritatively, it shouldn’t be in the book. Friends, we are fictioneers. We can use our empathy and curiosity to invent with truth. I’ve never (yet) been in a room with a dying cancer patient but I can find the resources to write about it convincingly and with respect (My Memories of a Future Life). Crime writers manage to find out how murderers think. If lack of life experience is stopping you using a plot idea, take a break to research it. Most of human experience has been set down in other novels or real-life accounts. Find them. Live your events in the imaginations of others until you feel armed to write them.

Here’s a separate reason why writers might avoid that funeral episode.

They assume the characters won’t do anything surprising. It’s just a funeral, right?

Many of us are reluctant to write a scene if we fear it will be predictable. That’s often good, but equally there are events that can’t be avoided without leaving an obvious hole. So we think we know what will happen at the funeral? We think the reader has seen it a dozen times before?

No they haven’t. Not with your characters.

You just set yourself a high-stakes challenge. So rock that funeral. Set up character developments the reader didn’t expect. Heal rifts. Or create them. Set your story on fire. Brainstorm the way to present the funeral, wake, mourning and fallout in a way that is not predictable.

An alternative suggestion: if you want the funeral to be fairly routine, you can show the impact with a light touch – perhaps a montage of details that are vivid enough to remain in the reader’s memory so that the event is marked. A character will put on a seldom-worn smart suit, which tells us there’s a formal occasion. The extended family reprioritise their diaries, all clearing the same date. Perhaps possessions are redistributed. Someone is dismayed to be bequeathed an ugly lamp but doesn’t feel they can refuse it because it belonged to the departed cousin. The mixed feelings this generates will be an interesting way to log the gravity of the event. Get creative. Have fun.

There’s a lot more advice on plotting in Writing Plots With Drama, Depth and Heart: Nail Your Novel 3.

Have you ever had feedback that told you you’d skimped on an important plot development? Do you remember your reasons for doing so – whether active avoidance or absent-mindedness?

 

Editing seminar snapshots: writing for a blog vs writing for a book

This week I’m running a series of the best discussion points from my talk at the Writers & Artists selfpublishing event. So far I’ve covered how producing a good book requires an editorial team, how authors need to allow enough time to use their feedback properly and author control. Today, it’s a rather thoughtful question about writing and self-editing in the digital age.

Who are you? Self-editing to self-censorship

I had a very interesting discussion with a lady who had written a book on creativity, and was turning some of it into a blog. She said she found she was editing differently when putting it on line. Where passages from the book contained deeply personal information, she was removing this, feeling it was not suitable for the public world of a blog, though she was happy to have it in the book.

I wonder, has anyone else experienced this? Are you a different writer in the depths of your book? Less self-conscious perhaps? More secure in your relationship with the reader? Is your blog more of your upbeat, ‘party’ persona and your book a buried, contemplative one?

Last week in Thought Catalog. Porter Anderson talked in about the modern phenomenon of writers sharing so much about their daily lives, which has never been possible before. He asked, does this ready familiarity with an author’s life spoil the mystique necessary to let a book do its proper work on the virgin snow of a reader’s mind?
He talks of ‘a certain remove by the artist of his or her daily private life from the stage…’ so that the book can speak for itself.

But after my conversation with the blogging writer, I wonder this: what might we keep back for a book, let ourselves tell only in a story? Surely a person who is committed to writing always holds something in reserve, a true kernel that gets its expression only in communication with the page, that indeed maybe doesn’t exist except in the private vault where the book speaks for us. That’s what makes us writers. Perhaps on our blogs we are comparatively extrovert. We may not mean to censor or conceal; we tailor our copy for a short-order medium. In our books, we inhabit an introverse. Do you?

Thanks to Henry Hyde for the pic of me, and to Sean Mundy on Flickr for the eye.

Anyway, let’s discuss. Does this say something about the different qualities of blogs versus books? Does it suggest what we might be missing if more of our reading time is taken up by ephemeral media such as blogs and newspapers, rather than books? Especially as we increasingly read them all on the one device? And where are you most you? Am I mad?

Editing seminar snapshots: negative criticism and author control

This week I’m running a series of the best discussion points from my talk at the Writers & Artists selfpublishing event. So far I’ve covered how producing a good book requires an editorial team and how authors need to allow enough time to use their feedback properly. Today, it’s how to cope with criticism.

Editing – an ordeal or not?

Henry Hyde (who took the pic of me!) asked the very good question of how writers respond when they receive a report. He’s the editor of a magazine, and said that contributors are often aghast when their work is red-penned. So what the blazes does a writer make of a 40-page document of major changes (as I described in my previous post)?

Well, I try to be gentle. I also encourage the author to see the report as criticism of the work, not them – although it’s often hard for them to see that. The more writing you do in a professional environment, the thicker your soles become and the more you’re able to see a manuscript as a work for others to help you with, rather than a bundle of your most tender nerve-endings.

It helps to have sensitive criticism, though. In traditional publishing, I’ve had savage editors who seemed to relish their chance to tear an author down – and generous souls who make it clear they are working for a book they already believe in. I hope I’ve learned from them how to be the latter.

The author has control

One author brought up an interesting point about a copy editor who had rewritten her dialogue, converting it unsuitably from period to a modern voice. With hindsight it was clear that the editor was probably working in an area outside her experience and thought all books should be edited the same way – a salutary warning to choose your team carefully. And several authors asked: ‘what if the author disagrees with the editor’?

A good question. It is, of course, entirely up to you what you do with a proof-reader’s tweaks or an editor’s recommendations. You are in control. Burn the report if you like, we’ll never know – but we’d prefer to think we’d been useful. I’m careful to make suggestions rather than must-dos, and to encourage an author to explore what they’re aiming for.

A good editor will also try to ensure they’re in tune with the author before any precious words change hands (let alone precious $$$). (Here’s my post on how a good editor helps you be yourself.  I’m not tooting my own trumpet here – for most of you who are reading this, it’s likely I won’t be the right editor. Be highly wary of anyone who says they can developmentally edit absolutely anything.)

Let me reiterate: it’s your book. YOUR book. The editor, copy editor and proof reader make suggestions, not commands. (The same applies in a traditional publishing contract, provided you haven’t assigned moral rights – which isn’t usual.)
Use this power wisely. (And, to return to Messrs Jon Fine and Joe Konrath , don’t publish shit.)

Thanks Toni Holopainen for the pic of the man undergoing a thorough edit
Next (and finally): self-editing to self-censorship
If you’ve worked with editors, how did you feel about their criticisms? If you’ve been through this process several times, have you toughened up? Have you disagreed with an editor’s suggestions, and what came of it? Have you ever paid for an editorial service and concluded it was a waste of time and money? Let’s discuss!

Editing seminar snapshots – how long to allow for rewrites

This week I’m running a series of the best discussion points from my talk at the Writers & Artists selfpublishing event. Yesterday I covered how producing a good book requires an editorial team. Today, it’s about allowing enough time to use their feedback properly.

Editing – will it derail your schedule?

One of the points I made was how long to allow for rewrites after the editor has done their worst – er, best. (Here’s my post on a publishing schedule for indie authors. )

I get a lot of enquiries from first-time authors who have already set a publication date and allowed a nominal fortnight or so to sort out the book after my report. They have no idea how deep a developmental edit might go. Especially for a first novel, or a first leap into an unfamiliar genre, you might need a few months to tune the book up. I know some writers who’ve taken a year on a rewrite, and I recently wrote a document of 20,000 words on a book of 100,000. Equally, other authors don’t need as much reworking and should have a usable manuscript inside a month.

But don’t make a schedule until your editor delivers their verdict – er, worst.

Thanks, Henry Hyde, for the pic of me 🙂
Next (after a brief sojourn at The Undercover Soundtrack): negative criticism
Have you had editorial feedback (whether from an editor or critique partners) that required major rewrites? How long did it take you to knock the manuscript into its new shape? Were you surprised?

Editing seminar snapshots – from Writers & Artists self-publishing day

As you might have seen from various flurries on Facebook and Twitter, last weekend I gave a talk at the Writers & Artists selfpublishing event in London. There are some interesting discussion points I want to share, and some of you will have crawled out of Nanowrimo and won’t be in the mood for a giant reading task, so I’ll be posting them in short bites over the next 6 days.

Editing – many minds make your book better

My task at the event was to explain the various steps of editing and why they were important – developmental editing, copy editing and proof reading (here’s my post on a publishing schedule for indie authors ).

This care with the book content was an absolute gold standard for the day, and was stressed over and again – guided rewriting with expert help, and attention to detail.

JJ Marsh of Triskele Books  in her talk on how their collective works, said that the combined critical talents of her fellow authors had made her books far better than she could have made them on her own. Psychological thriller writer Mark Edwards, women’s fiction author Talli Roland all talked about the people who helped shoulder the responsibility of getting the book to a publishable standard. Jon Fine, director of author and publisher relations at Amazon, cut to the chase by quoting thriller selfpublishing phenomenon Joe Konrath : ‘Don’t publish shit.’ (Next time I’ll just say that.)

Some of the delegates didn’t need to be told anyway. From a show of hands, roughly a fifth of them had already been working with editors, in thriving professional relationships where their limits were being pushed and they were being challenged to raise their game. If there’s one advantage selfpublishing can give us, it’s the control over our destiny and artistic output, and many of these writers were committed to making books they could be proud of.

Eek, the cost!

True, good editing comes at a cost. Jeremy Thompson of the Matador selfpublishing imprint gave grim warnings about companies that advertise editing services for just $99. And it probably seems unjust that a pastime that should be so cheap has such a steep price tag. Writing is free as air, after all. But publishing isn’t. It never has been. No manuscript ever arrived at a publisher and went straight onto the presses. It went through careful stages of professional refinement – which takes time and money.

That said, there are ways to get useful developmental help without breaking the bank – here’s my post on 4 low-cost ways to get writing tuition if you can’t afford an editor.

Thanks for the picture, Henry Hyde

Tomorrow: how long to allow for rewrites
Have you worked with an editor or critique partner who helped you improve your book? Or perhaps the opposite….? Let’s discuss!

How to develop a writer’s instinct

How do we develop a writer’s instinct? How do we get the confidence to strike out creatively? How might we become more original in our writing?

I’m thinking about this because the other day I heard an interview with the British actor Peter Bowles. He explained that much of the time in acting life, he’d try to second-guess the director. When his character seized a sword or opened a letter, he’d be trying to figure out how the director wanted him to do it. Partly this was survival – after all, he wanted to be hired again. And he had a team player’s instinct to collaborate and please. However, he was aware that he was missing a fundamental connection – with the author of the text, and what they wanted.

But, said Bowles, this all changed when he put on a mask. Yep,. he couldn’t see the director any more but that’s not as fatuous as you think. It narrowed his awareness to just him and the text. And then it was as if all doubts vanished; the white noise of other people disappeared and he was suddenly certain of the emotions and truth in a dramatic moment. He knew, from inside, what to do.

It strikes me that writers spend a lot of time second-guessing. We’re surrounded by muddling influences. What’s popular in the market, what our favourite authors recently did. Suggestions from our extended writing family. Even, requests from our readers.

Writing has never been so connected. We can bust out of isolation, join social writing communities and cheer each other through Nanowrimo. As soon as a chapter leaves the brain, we can offer it for comment if we wish. Oh I’m not saying it isn’t fantastic to have support and guidance. If I disapproved, I’d hardly bother you with my weekly volume of bloggery. I love the world wide web of creativity we have. But no one knows a work’s bones as well as its creator. Are we taking enough quiet time to discover its deeper, instinctive truth?

I think there’s a part of writing that cannot be social. It must be done alone, unplugged and in a safe space. That’s how we strike out and find true inspiration – for the direction of a story, the meaning of a setting, the innate humour in a scene. It’s how we develop instincts we can rely on and a voice that’s indubitably our own. It’s how we become original and authentic.

Like those actors, there are times when we need to put on the mask and see what we find.

Thanks for the pic Douglas R Witt

TINY NEWSFLASH Continuing the theme of creating our own space, I’ve revamped my author website with a new design and some extra pages, including Why I self-publish and a picture tour of my writing process.

Let’s discuss in the comments: Do you take time to retreat with your work? What do you do to cultivate your writer’s instinct?

A site to help you fill the gaps in your story outline

I’m shuffling ideas for The Venice Novel and I’ve come across a fantastic site that’s helping me clarify where I want to take the story.

It’s called Television Tropes and Idioms. But don’t be fooled by its name. Tropes doesn’t mean cliches; it means story conventions and readers’ expectations. In fact, you can use the site as a cliche and stereotype warning – it tells you what’s already been done to death so you can keep your story and characters fresh and original. And the site includes movies and novels as well – of all types, all genres (and even stories that don’t fit easily anywhere).

I’m using it to fill gaps. At the moment I have a rudimentary cast of characters and a fundamental conflict, so I need to see what else could gather around it. Poking around in the subject sections (‘topical tropes’, in the left sidebar) suggested a lot more places I could take the characters and ways to develop the plot. It also gave me ideas for more defined roles my characters could play.

If you want to hit a particular genre, zip down the left-hand sidebar and look up ‘literature’ and you’ll find a list of categories to clarify where you fit. You can also check you’ve covered enough bases to satisfy readers and identify possibilities you might not have thought of.

But even if you don’t fit traditional pigeonholes (like certain folks I could mention), you can look up story ingredients, such as ‘war’, ‘betrayal’ or ‘family’ – just for instance, under the latter you get a delicious sub-list with suggestions like ‘amicably divorced’, ‘hippie parents’, ‘dysfunctional’.

Some writers get their first inspirational spark from a setting – if that’s you, you can research how other authors have done your setting justice, from pre-history to ‘4000 years from now (and no jetpack)’.

One of the other things I like about it – very much – is its tone. No judgements are made about whether genres are fashionable, overworked, lowbrow or highbrow. It’s all about celebrating how stories work – or sometimes don’t. As we know, that comes down to the writer’s skill anyway, not whether a ‘subject’  is en vogue. And after a few hours in the company of their rather breezy descriptions, not only will you be better informed, you will be spurred to avoid the lazy story decision.

If you’re sprucing up your outline – especially as NaNoWriMo looms – spend an afternoon exploring Television Tropes and give your story a thorough workout.

Do have any go-to sites when you’re planning a novel – and how do you use them? Share in the comments!

You can find tips for researching, outlining and what makes a robust story in my book, Nail Your Novel – Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence. Available on Kindle and in print.