The Care and Feeding of Plotbunnies

This article was originally written for Fairfield County Writers, now Full Coverage Writers.

Many a published writer sighs when asked "where do you get your ideas?" Many a beginning writer sighs at the common response that "ideas are everywhere!"

But it's true. They are. Imagine a boat on the ocean. Maybe, once in a while, a fish jumps, but mostly the boat's crew won't see any fish--until they pull in their nets. Then! Oh, then, there are so many brilliant, odd, wondrous fish all across the deck! There may be one never seen before, or one thought extinct for five hundred years or more. And sometimes they fall together in such interesting patterns...

Ideas are, truly, everywhere. It's a matter of pulling in your nets.

Yes, you have nets. And they catch ideas. Plotbunnies, if you will.

Did something catch your eye today? Maybe a man in a nice suit was wearing a pair of worn sneakers and you wondered if he grabbed the wrong shoes, or if something happened to the dress shoes he should have been wearing. That's a bunny. And that woman with the sad eyes, whose story you don't know but whose face won't leave your mind's eye? She gave you a bunny too.

What, you ask, is a plotbunny? The name implies fluffiness, a cute loveable bit of soft and snuggly writing. Little could be farther from the truth. Plotbunnies are sneaky, slippery, manipulative little beasts. They can be aggressive, too, but right now we're talking about the elusive ones.

So. No, the sad-eyed woman is not a plot all to herself. You need more. Maybe...you need the mismatched man, too. And a setting. A bit more wondering. We need to feed the bunny if we want it to grow.

My first response to our sad woman and the mismatched man is a romance to take away the woman's sadness. But the first response is often the clichéd response, so let's go a little farther afield. Let's make the mismatched man her husband. He's in shock over the sudden loss of their child, and unable to quite get mundane things right.

How did the child die? That depends on the story you want to write. Was he ill? Was she murdered? Is he not truly dead, but removed by the government because he's the next step in human evolution a la the X-men?

What if her eyes aren't sad as much as they are weary? Maybe the man is her developmentally-disabled brother, and she's spent her life caring for him. She's tired, cynical, and full of regrets for a life not lived, torn between the ticking clock and her love for her brother.

Or you could take it much farther. The mismatched man is an alien in disguise, who hasn't quite figured out human fashion. The sad-eyed woman is a fugitive, who over-did the make-up in trying to disguise her artificial eyes.

The trick to a great idea is to take something that catches your attention, that piques your interest, and add to it. Play with it. Toss a stick and see what it brings back.

My serial fantasy started with one awesome character, a red-headed elf with a bad attitude. Where most elves are about sunshine and dancing and the wonders of nature, Flame thinks nature should be outside, humans are pretty cool, and wine is the best thing ever.

As mentioned earlier, one character does not a plot make. So I tried another. Elves and dwarves traditionally do not get along, so I stuck a dwarf in--and he and Flame were suddenly old friends. Okay, so he stuck, but still not enough--I decided I needed a "normal" elf for comparison, so I gave her Ryahled, a by-the-book elven ranger as shiny and impressive as elven rangers get. Now I had some sparks flying. Ryahled lectures, Flame rebels, and story happens.

Another thing I did was to poke at the "traditional" dislike elves and dwarves hold for each other. I decided to go with it--why waste a good source of conflict?--but to give it a reason. In Flame's world, there are several different intelligent races--and all but the humans and the elves (who aren't really elves, bwahaha) were created by the elves. The dwarves hate the elves because they have not forgotten they were slaves. And the elves fear and distrust the dwarves, who have not forgotten over millennia. This, and the fact that I like mysterious ruins, formed much of the basis of my plot.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, even in this economy. It's what you do with the ideas that matters, so grab a few that look shiny to you, and twist them together. Glue on a hubcap, or douse your creation in glitter, and see where it gets you. The worst that can happen is that the whole castle folds up and sinks into the swamp and you have to start over.