Plot Bunny Proliferation: Working With Our Imaginations

by Cat Woods

Ask nearly any writer and you'll hear complaints about the distracting qualities of plot bunnies.  Current WIPs often get left by the wayside as brand new plot bunnies entice writers away from one project after another, leaving a wake of half-realized manuscripts.  Plot bunnies can be dangerous to the unsuspecting.  Just like their counterparts are in my garden.

My back yard is a bunny haven.  While we have two dogs, neither of them are interested in chasing bunnies away from my flowers.  We also have a fence that should keep the bunnies out.  Instead, it seems to keep them in.  I think they like the safety and the ready to eat treats.  We've tried... eliminating them in the kindest way possible to no avail.  So, after years of fighting them, I've gotten to the point of working with them.

I've allowed them unlimited winter access to my landscaping smorgasboard as long as they turn tail in the spring.  It seems to work for both of us.  They prune my lilac tree, and every spring it fills out beautifully.  They sheer off my perennials so I have less winter yuck to clean up.  And the babies are just too dang cute as they romp around in the melting snow.

Plot bunnies are no different than real bunnies.  They feed off the delicate blooms of our imaginations, yet can be nearly impossible to capture. They also multiply at the same rate—which is to say writers typically have far more of them at any given point than they know what to do with—and the babies are especially cute and compelling.

If left unchecked, both plot bunnies and their real life companions can destroy the best-laid plans.

While I haven't quite mastered corraling all my plot bunnies, I've found that treating them the same as my backyard bunnies helps keep my writing on track.

I allow them unlimited access during certain seasons. 

Seriously, in between projects I allow myself the freedom to explore any idea that pops into my head.  I have dozens of started projects.  These projects run about 1,200 words and capture the essence of my ideas.  I don't consider these failures or unfinished projects.  I consider them practice.  They also become a part of my writing file that I can pick through at other times.  By giving them page space, the plot bunnies settle down and allow me to funnel my attention on my WIPs.

I feed them.

Strange, but true.  I figure if I ever trap and kill off the rabbits in my mind, I'll have nothing left to work with, so I encourage them to multiply as needed.  I always carry a notebook with me.  It's filled with hundreds of mini-outlines, names, places, spaces and character sketches.  Whenever a new thought strikes, I jot it down and play with it.

What I find most often is that the plot bunny isn't fully formed—and likely never will be.  Rather, it is just a shiny, new idea that looks as cute and cuddly as the baby Easter Bunny.  It's exciting for a moment, but once it's placed in the notebook among the other bunnies, it loses some of its appeal.  It's underdeveloped and malnourished.  At least for the time being.

Rarely, the idea solidifies.  It gels, either on its own merit or within the context of other ideas.  Eventually, a few bunnies band together and prune back the winter detritus, leaving room for spring's new blooms.  Whenever I see or hear something I think my plot bunnies would like to eat, I add it to the notbeook.  As time goes on, these ideas become new WIPs. 

And the best part about feeding ideas this way: it takes virtually no time.  Once I pen my plot bunny in ink, I'm freed to think about other things.  Namely my current writing project.

So, the idea behind plot bunnies is to corral them, not eliminate them.  If we embrace our fertile imaginations and provide some boundaries for dealing with new ideas, we will be less tempted to leave our current WIPs whenever a new bunny hops by.

How do you wrangle your plot bunnies into submission?  Do you allow new ideas to take over current projects?  If so, how does that work out?

Curious minds want to know.

This weekend, Cat Woods started spring cleaning her garden.  Thanks to the backyard bunnies, she has more time to spend with her plot bunnies.  You can find her wrangling both rabbits on her blog: Words from the Woods.

Writing Superstitions and Rituals

by Cat Woods

Two days ago, our own RS Mellette issued a challenge to writers everywhere. "Come forth, my fellow scribes. Come forth from your burrows and burgs. Unite together in a common cause and claim a world-renowned good luck phrase to be heard throughout the generations."

Sad, isn't it, that writing is such a solitary experience we have no universal truths of our own?

Sadder still, when you consider everything that does. Friday the Thirteenth equals bad luck, while a bee flying through an open door guarantees a visitor will appear soon. Black cats and ladders, broken mirrors and broken legs? Even classical music has its own Curse of the Ninth.

RS—and the upcoming Halloween holiday—got me thinking about writing superstitions and rituals. Where do they come from, and why do we use them? Do they really work, or are they nothing more than placebos for our artistically thirsty souls? In a nutshell, superstition is the act of attributing an outcome to a completely unrelated event. The more frequently a coincidence "succeeds," the more likely it will become a part of everyday practices and rituals.

After careful research—and an unofficial poll of authors, agented writers, experienced scribes and newly minted ones—I realized writing does not have a universal superstition or a must-do ritual because every writer is as unique as every story ever told. Writing is highly personalized, and as such, we bring our own personalities to the process.

Consider the following: 37 of the 45 writers polled admitted to having some sort of quirk.

• Manuscripts must end on an even numbered page. Period. If not, the story is doomed to failure.
• Chapters cannot have thirteen pages in them, nor can books end with a mere thirteen chapters.
• No characters can have the same initials as anyone the writer knows in person or bad fortune will befall said real life person.
• Each manuscript has its own "writing spot." If a new manuscript is typed in a previously used spot, the ghosts of the old characters will affect the personalities of the new characters.
• One writer refuses to eat anything sweet whenever the antagonist is on the page for fear s/he will be tainted with the sweetness.
• Conversely another sucks on lemon drops while penning the villain's scenes.
• Back in her querying days, one writer used to wiggle her "jazz fingers" as the email took off through cyberspace. You know, their own personal cheering section...
• Another aspiring writer swears off coffee until a certain number of responses returns to her inbox so as not to use up her "good stuff" quota on her caffeine addiction.
• More than one writer claims that successful writing is all in the pen. Certain writers adhere to the use of certain utensils, some going as far as refilling their pens with ink.
• One scribe uses a single pencil per manuscript. If the manuscript is short, she breaks the pencil in half at the end so it can't be used for a second story. If the manuscript is long, she literally writes her pencil down to the nub.
• One writer—back in the snail mail days—signed every query letter with the same ballpoint pen. Incidentally, she used this pen to sign her agent contract. She hopes, of course, that the good karma associated with it will someday lead her to a publishing contract, which she will sign with the very old and tired Bic.
• Whimsical attire. Anything from smoking jackets to fuzzy slippers, and robes to hand-knit gloves, clothe writers world-wide while penning their words. One writer admitted to wearing a splash of green every day during the writing of her rough drafts—EVERY DAY—because green means "go" and she swears the color nudges her muse in the right direction.
• Pipes, whiskey, chocolate, Baileys and chai tea. Vices run rampant in the writing world. Some with the purpose of calming nerves, while others to simply keep idle fingers not so idle when the words cease to flow.
• One writer swears by a single coffee mug. The only time she drinks from it is when she's writing a rough draft. The only time she spikes it is when she completes her first read-through.
• Totems or mythical muses can grace the shelves and minds of writers everywhere. These little critters are said to ignite creativity and provide good juju. These are especially prolific during the frenzy of National Novel Writing Month.
• Writing every day is another common theme. However, one writer takes this to the extreme. He literally writes every single day. Even if it is only one word. One month he wrote 32 whole words. He does this so he is continuously making progress on his novels. Before starting this practice, he said his projects rarely made it to completion. Now, they always do.
• Some scribes wear their MC's personalities to achieve better characterization, and have been known to prance around in outfits better suited to a television set than an office.
• More than one writer rearranges the letters of favorite authors' names to create pen names. Obviously it worked once...

As you can see, the methods to our superstitious madness are as varied as the writers we meet.

So, dear scribes, what rituals or superstitions do you have regarding the writing or publishing process? Do they seem to work or do you simply enjoy the mystique that accompanies such whimsies?

Writing Lessons from a Blogvel

by Cat Woods

First off, a Round-Robin Blogvel is a novel told chapter by chapter on various blogs over a period of time. Inevitably this means different authors with different writing styles and different perspectives. It also means a unique writing experience. And yet, the nuggets of wisdom I gathered while penning my chapter of THE SKELETON KEY are as common as punctuation marks in a WIP and can should be applied to any novel.

Characters are like exclamation points. Use them sparingly, but with confidence. As I read the early chapters of our blogvel, I quickly realized the cast of characters was very large. Each new writer would introduce a character or two, but never have the time in their mere 2,000 words to fully flesh them out or utilize them the way they were first envisioned. Over time, early characters were quickly forgotten. Worse yet was my natural inclination to dismiss newer introductions because I assumed they, too, would fade into the background. As the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition) states: an exclamation point “should be used sparingly to be effective.” And so must our characters.

Details are like dashes. Grammar Girl informs us that dashes are used to add a bit of extra-ness (my word, not hers) into our writing. Details are important in world-building. They set the scene, describe our characters and place readers into our settings. However, too many dashes are akin to detail over-load. My favorite part of our blogvel was my fellow scribes' creativity and imagination. Yet with each new chapter came new descriptions to flesh out the new ideas. This was delightful in a chapter by chapter summer blogvel of fun, but would have been extremely distracting in a cohesive novel. Distracting and tiring for readers to sort through poetic prose to find important information pertinent to the outcome of the story.

Pacing is like a series of commas. Some sentences are quick and dirty and get right to the point. Others slow the reader down with the use of a tiny crescent comma. The genius of the comma is its ability to allow the reader a small break—a deep breath of air, a rearranging of thoughts or an emotional moment to gather one's self. Likewise, the ebb and flow of a manuscript relies on individual sentence structure, paragraph breaks and chapter endings. A good manuscript takes readers on a series of peaks and valleys before reaching the ultimate conflict and resolution. There is a cadence—or rhythm—to effective writing that dictates when conflict is introduced and when it is resolved. While reading through the chapters prior to writing mine, I hit a point that FELT climactic. I scurried to our chapter list and realized we had just as many chapters to write as had already been written. It was time for a comma.

While I slowed our story down, wrapping up key elements, tying together subplots and penning a satisfying finish all in a single chapter will fall to our last, brave writer. My advice: keep track of your story's pace and finish up old subplots as new ones are getting started. This will eliminate the need to write a massive wrap-up at the end.

Chapter ends are like ellipses. Over at Quick and Dirty Tips, Grammar Girl relates the story of how Charles Schulz used ellipses in his Peanuts cartoons to carry the reader from one frame to the next, much like our blogvel writers were called on to do with their chapters. Time is short, and commitment is long. Readers often do not have the ability to read a novel in one sitting. As writers, we are charged with capturing our readers' attention and drawing them so deeply into the story that the real world doesn't erase our efforts at storytelling altogether. Chapter breaks—with their hints of unresolved conflict and promises of heightened emotion/action—are crucial to this process.

Consistency is like a period. This plain-Jane punctuation mark is so unassuming as to almost disappear from our work. Very seldom do writers ever ponder on the use of a period. Nor do readers fret about its meaning—unless it's used improperly or missing altogether. In the same way, consistent writing comforts us. When written well, writing is all but invisible. Only the story remains. Yet, throw a third person chapter in the middle of a first person novel and watch how fast readers are pulled out of a story. Yep ... that fast. And while it may seem like I'm picking on my talented, energetic and amazingly fun fellow scribes, I only highlight this lesson because it is one I've seen in virtually every beta manuscript I've ever read. In other words, a lack of consistency is commonplace in WIPs no matter how experienced or talented a writer might be. First person to third person. Present tense mixed with past tense. Red eyes morphing to obsidian-like stones. Unique spelling—or should I say misspellings?—of names.

It is our job, as writers, to create a seamless tale in which our readers can fall into and never emerge from until "the end"—no matter how many authors contribute to the storytelling.

So, dear readers, how have you challenged yourself as a writer? What lessons can be learned from stretching beyond our comfort zones? How do we learn to recognize our own weaknesses in the stories we tell?

If you're interested, you can pop on over and find out exactly what my weaknesses were when writing my chapter of The Skeleton Key.

A Clean House is One in Which No Writing is Being Done (Unless You Have A Maid, But That’s Cheating)

by Mindy McGinnis

I’ve got to admit that I’m often torn between the demands of real life, and the demands of the fake people who live in my head.  Sure, there are certain responsibilities that must be attended to—cats don’t feed themselves, dog vomit doesn’t magically disappear—but is it imperative that my dresser be dusted off?  Who sees it anyway?  Me.  And do I care?

Technically, no.  I don’t.  Most of the dust in my bedroom is comprised of my own dead skin cells anyway, right?  So why do I care if part of me now resides on top of my dresser?  It makes its own kind of sense, really.  But—even practical me gets a dragging sense of inadequacy when I see that layer of dust.  I’ve failed as a housekeeper.

Then the flip side asks me—what if I fail as a writer?  What if the fake people in my head die and I walk around smelling bad because of it?  OK that last bit isn’t going to happen, but cutting off the circulation to my imagination will in fact kill my characters, and nothing cuts off the blood flow to the brain like housework.

And hey fellas—this applies across the board.  I know plenty of awesome dudes and single fathers who work their butts off, so don’t think that this is a female-centric philosophy. 

I was recently reading the excellent book Women Who Run With the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and came upon this excellent quote:

“I've seen women work long, long hours at jobs they despise in order to buy very expensive items for their houses, mates, or children, and putting their considerable talents on the back burner. I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write... and you know, it's a funny thing about house cleaning... it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow overresponsibility (or overrespectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, rifts, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

Think on that for a bit, the last sentence particularly.  It resonated with me, and I’m betting it will with you, too.