Episode 12: Beware the Plot Bunny
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Welcome to the Shy Girls Finish Last podcast. I'm Nicole Lathen, a certified shy Black girl. I hope you’ve had a restful day. Let’s get into it!
Hey ya'll, thank you for joining me. Ah, I can't believe I made it to the end of this series! Go me! And go you for being here to listen to me yap! Today, I want to talk about plot bunnies. What they are and how to manage them. They multiply, rapidly, and it is too easy to get overwhelmed. This is Common Myths and Where to Find Them Part 6: Beware the Plot Bunny.
Where do ideas come from? Random synapses in the brain? Fluttering thoughts or scenes in our head that make us giddy? Little bunnies multiplying as the idea builds and builds? Is it divined to us by the elusive Muse?
Ideas can truly come from anywhere. As writers, it is our job to observe what is around us and then show what we see. It's to share cultures, traditions, thoughts, and challenges. It's designed to make us feel, make us think, make us reach out and discuss with others. So as writers, you have to look up.
So much of our lives is spent with our necks craned, full attention glued to our phones. So much of the world passes us by because we've traded the physical world for the digital one. In our digital lives, we're more honest, more open, seeking out like-minded people to make it easier to accept ourselves. We can also curate our experiences. We spend time in safe spaces, in our comfort zone, looking at the same things over and over. Switching between the same 3 apps.
We're frozen into the pitfall of waiting for divine intervention to make us move, reach out, and starting spinning a wild tale. That we're going to have the Perfect Idea the first time we sit down and write. And sadly, that's just not true. There is no such thing as perfection. There is no such thing as the Perfect Idea or a One True Muse.
Relying on inspiration is a dangerous game. It takes time and effort to look for ideas. It takes you doing your part to observe the world around you. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary. The strange in the normal.
That rusted water tower turns into a sleepy, late 90s town where a murder rocks a small, tight knit community. That old, craggy bridge that's ugly to look at is a portal to a community full of trolls. What happens if a human manages to pass through the portal? If it's snowing outside, what if it's falling debris from an invading alien armada?
Since ideas can come from anywhere, a lack of inspiration means you have to go out and farm more. Inspiration is not a bottomless well that you can draw from. That's why you have to rest. That's why you have to read from others. Watch TV. Go for a hike. Get out in nature. Take a road trip. Treat yourself to ice cream. Go out and be among people, however annoying.
Pluck those ideas out of the ether. Carry a smaller notebook with you or use the notes app in your phone. Jot down ideas that pass your mind. Look at flowers and think of how to describe them and then try to describe them better. Hear a snippet of conversation and imagine what comes next. What's the weather like? How would a character react to this type of weather?
As writers, as creative people, you choke your Muse when you starve it of new experiences. Variety truly is the spice of life. Try different things. Go different places. It's not until you get out of your head and out into the world that you start to notice nuance in your writing. The ideas practically write themselves when you're constantly feeding it new thoughts, new situations, or new lines of dialogue.
But beware. As you grow in your journey, you will see ideas everywhere. And I truly mean everywhere. At any time. The more you take in, the more your brain has to work with so it starts filling in gaps when you're going through a lack of inspiration period. Next thing you know, you're off working on it and tooling it until you're back in the cycle.
Think of the analogy I made in Episode 10. As a chef in your kitchen, when you have an idea on the back burner, the more you're out of your head, the better the ingredients you're adding to the pot. Your brain is adding in seasoning, chopping up onions, and boiling hot. Your instinct will be to run and work on it. But keep letting it simmer. Let the ancestors tell you when it's done.
If you don't, you'll look up and you'll see an endless sea of unfinished projects because you're hopping from idea to idea. You get excited, write in a mad dash, start critiquing it, and then moving on to the next thing. All that accomplishes is you getting buried under a million ideas with nothing to truly work on.
And because you're overwhelmed, it's easy to blame that for why you're not writing. Or there's a lack of inspiration so you can't write. But we want to write. We want to get good at writing. And that means having plot bunny management. Carry that notebook, use your notes app, whatever you need to do. But stay on task. Focus on finishing.
How do you choose which idea to work on? Generally, work on the one you can't stop thinking about. Even when you get ten new ideas that day, you're still thinking of the loudest one. The one that you see everywhere you look. Focus on the one that makes you most interested to work on. If you're excited enough to work on an idea, then keep at that idea. It doesn't mean you can't take breaks and work on something else in tandem if you feel confident enough in your abilities. But as a new writer, it is my best advice to stick to one project at a time.
For me, when I wrote With These Words, I was also working on short stories for my writing community. I balanced the two whenever the nerves got too bad to do With These Words justice. With the short stories, the pressure was off and reminded me that writing is supposed to be fun. And when I felt confident again, I went right back to working on my novel. Because I wanted to finish.
And all that time, I had new ideas. My notes app is a mile long with random little nuggets of ideas. They could be something, but they may not be. Sometimes it was notes on the novel and I reworked my outline accordingly. Sometimes it was something completely random from a song I heard or a scene I watched. What's important that I accepted the idea, wrote it down or let it go, and continued working on the novel. If I followed every shiny idea that came to me, I'd still be writing it.
Plot bunnies are those seemingly innocent little pushes from ideas. Because the inspiration is fresh in your mind, you want to run and work on it. You want to toy with it and turn it every which way, endlessly brainstorming new and better ideas. But ideas don't make finished novels. Ideas don't become something for you and readers to enjoy unless you put in the time to work on it. Unless you become disciplined enough to stick to a routine.
I always set myself up for failure. I chased shiny idea after shiny idea, never truly finishing anything because I was scared to finish. I was afraid to share my work with others so if I never finished, I never had to follow through and share. And I couldn't see any movement in my writing. I couldn't objectively see my writing and pinpoint the areas I needed to work on. I spent so long, woe is me, wondering how I could cross the finish line.
And my boyfriend would joke that I lacked discipline. And I would shake it off but it was true. I did lack discipline. I lacked the fortitude to stick to my goal and complete it by any means necessary.
In the same way that you can only have so many pots on the stove, you can only hold space for so many ideas. Work on your ideas. Pick one. Follow it to the end and stay disciplined enough to stick with it. Let the ideas simmer and grow. The other ideas aren't going anywhere. You won't lose steam for any of them. And if you did, then so what. You're growing and listening to your instincts and that's more important.
Follow the muse wherever it may take you. And what that means is follow your instincts wherever possible. If an idea feels ready, feels fleshed out, then start plotting it. Start brainstorming in earnest. If the idea is still too murky, then put it back on simmer. Look for more inspiration to help fill in the murky areas.
Become a rebel and love your writing through the cringe, plot holes, character arcs, and sentence structures. Love it through re-write after re-rewrite. Write what makes you happy, what makes you sad or angry. Write what makes you hot and bothered. There is a whole world out there who could use your story. You could use your story.
Whether it's a celebrity, your future self, to just write fluffy romance, use your Muse to stick to your writing. Use it as a springboard to more ideas, not as a bottomless well. Manage your ideas by keeping a notebook to store the overflow. Lean into ideas that are screaming loudest in your brain. Listen to your instincts, you have them for a reason.
Before we wrap up, I invite you to join me. Take out your journal and write about all your unfinished projects and why you stopped working on them. Write about how many new, shiny ideas you came up with. Write about the idea that you can't stop thinking about, that makes you a little scared to work on it. Write about the last song that inspired you. Write about the last book that made you cry. I will post my answer on my Instagram.
I hope these common myths have been debunked for you. Thank you for rocking with me. See you next time for When Zora Was a Young Warthog, the origin story of my book With These Words.