Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Humpday Help - Plot Bunnies


For the next several weeks, Humpday Help will attempt to explain Plot Bunnies. First of all, a Plot Bunny is an idea for a story that gnaws at the brain until written.
Some well known plot bunnies that have been positively identified. There are various breeds, thousands of them, and many aren't even tied to writing. Inventors and scientists have their own breeds of plot bunnies that lead them to discoveries where A leads to B which jumps to G or even Z.
Here are a few Plot Bunnies that commonly plague writers.
The Lop-eared Sitting Around Talking Shorthair
Physical Characteristics: Lop ears, short brown/grey flecked fur
How to identify his presence: When your characters inevitably come to a point where the plot simply won't advance, so they sit on a couch/the ground/ a golf cart/ a pirate ship and start talking about nothing in particular. Some couple thousand words later, a plot bunny pops up, grins, and heads off! It can always be discovered in this kind of plot stall, and it's known for waiting until the last possible moment (the moment when you are about to throw your laptop across the table) to come and create a diversion.
The Mystery Plot Bunny
Physical Characteristics: Black, short hair with small, pointed ears.
How to identify his presence: This bunny is attracted to plots which aren't usually intended to have any mystery. The bad guys are known, the goal is visible, but suddenly the Mystery Plot Bunny appears and there's a piece of information lacking, a lost object, or an unknown baddie that needs to be discovered and stopped.
This bunny is known to complicate plots far more than they need to be. Usually can be made happy with a missing item, but sometimes demands the more involved mysteries.
Killer bunny
Physical Characteristics: Small, white, red eyes
How to identify his presence: Not unlike the much-feared Monty Python variety, this little white bunny looks harmless as you're writing along, and then up close, abruptly kills off a character you weren't expecting to kill - at least, you didn't intend for it to go right THEN! In its wake, it leave behind a host of new plot opportunities... as well as some definite Closed Paths.