If you’ve never heard of a Plot Bunny before, the idea is fairly simple. A Plot Bunny is a story idea. It’s cute and fluffy and you want to take it home right away and start loving it and spoiling it. You can’t get a Plot Bunny at the SPCA, they find you.
But beware! Make sure your Plot Bunny isn’t pregnant! If she is, you’ll soon have so many Plot Bunnies hopping around that you won’t have time to love or spoil any of them!
So what you want to do first is create an enclosure for your new friend. I use a Libre Office file. I put the PB inside, with just enough “food and water” so he won’t die. There’s plenty of room in there to hop around, and Plot Bunnies only rarely escape from these enclosures. Other people pen them up in notebooks or index cards. Plot Bunnies are very small and can be comfortable in any of these types of enclosures.
I say they rarely escape, and that’s true. But every once in a while, one manages to slip out and breed with another PB. Then, before you know it, you have a bouncing bundle of Plot Bunnies which can be hard to catch and contain.
Most people can only work with one Plot Bunny at a time, though if you’re one whose containment has failed and you suddenly have a jillion related PBs, you can sometimes weave them all into one story.
Oh they come in all kinds, Plot Bunnies do. Baby bunnies that aren’t ready for a story yet, big mean bunnies that you need leather armor to extract from their pens, and, sadly, sometimes a Plot Bunny that isn’t robust enough to create a story out of. In that last sad case, it can be helpful to carefully pen another PB with the weaker one: sometimes company will cheer it into health. But again, watch out for pregnancy. The last thing you want is six hundred ideas that just can’t be made into a story no matter how much effort you put into it.
And sometimes they teleport right out of their pens and you never seen hide nor hare of them again (I couldn’t resist).
When you’re feeling creatively stuck, go visit your Plot Bunnies. Maybe there is one that’s raring to go.
Happy Writing!
Read more about Plot Bunnies in the latest volume of An Excuse for Company!