If you’re a writer populating these here interwebs, and you don’t know about the site TV tropes, you should do yourself a favor and rectify that right now. What is it? It is a wiki that deals with, well, tropes in fiction: character types, situations, plot devices and so on. And, despite the name, it does so for all media. While at first blush it might seem a bit fannish, it provides a rather exhaustive deconstruction of just about any narrative device you can think of, and probably a lot more you haven’t. It is as if the Turkey City Lexicon achieved sentience and spawned a new species that is slowly attempting to take over the internet.
One of the better ways to play wit it is to search for a book/movie/tv series you happen to like (or are just familiar with), and scroll down to the section listing what tropes it provides examples of. Here are some choice entries to get you started:
