Preparation and research is vital to any writer, just discard that gorilla - Ian McMillan

Those are the two words that should be at the forefront of every writer’s mind because they will help your writing to sing and dance and not strike a wrong note or trip over its metaphorical feet.

Mind you, there are pros and cons to research and preparation and I’ll give you examples of one pro and one con and then you can decide for yourself.

I’ll start, counter-intuitively, with the con: many years ago me and my mate Martyn were working as a comedy and poetry duo called Jaws. We would tour the singers’ nights (the equivalent of today’s open mic nights) and perform our hilarious verse and rib-shattering parody songs.

This was the early 1970s and there was a vogue, as there often is, for running to keep fit, although in those days we called it jogging. We prepared and researched a funny song about running and we decided that we’d record ourselves running and gasping for breath and then play that as a backing track to the song.

We decided to record the running on a quiet back road that our preparation told us was almost completely devoid of traffic. We stood there in our shorts.

Martyn held the cumbersome recording device and we began to run. But then a bloke drove past in his car and shouted “GET THEM KNEES UP!” and then he turned round and shouted it again. And again. Maybe the road wasn’t as quiet as we thought it was. Our preparation had let us down badly.

The pro of research and preparation, on the other hand, won me a wooden badger. It was 1992 and I decided that I’d enter the BBC Wildlife Poet of the Year Competition to win some money, a fancy pen, and the aforementioned wooden badger.

I did my research by reading a lot of wildlife poems and I found that many of them were about big items of wildlife like lions, tigers and bears. I divined that one of the least celebrated items of wildlife (can you call them items of wildlife? I think you can) in the whole of literature was the humble snail.

I tried to put myself in the minds of the judges and I imagined them saying things like: “Oh no, not another poem about a hippopotamus!” and I sat down and wrote a poem that featured snails heavily; I sent the poem off and promptly forgot about it until a message arrived by what we call snail mail these days telling me that I’d won and that I was invited to Bristol to pick up my wooden badger, my cheque and my fancy pen.

And if I hadn’t done my research I may well have written a villanelle about a gorilla that would have ended up on the slush pile in a screwed-up heap.

Research and preparation. Get them knees up. Discard that gorilla.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson