How do you feed your plotbunnies?

[GrantBricksly]

I rarely work on more than one piece at the same time... I tried once... But then when I went back for editing I found characters and locations from story a, in story b, and vice versa. My plot bunnies had migrated and cross propagated.
It was a mess.

That being said I do often have plot bunnies come to visit. So I'll write them down and tuck them away in my bunny farm. And when I'm ready for a new project, I'll go looking for one that's ready for fattening.
If I get stuck on a story, my plot bunny is sick...so I'll bring it to my farm for a while to heal and get better.

 

[iwatchus]

Right now, as I regularly fight myself to get productive on stories, I bounce between stories, to see if I can get one to catch me. Or I spend too much time in AH.

When I swap to a new story, I re-readwhat I have already read of it, making some edits. This seems to clear my head enough to not intermingle. Or I can talk about one of the stories I am trying to write as a plot point in another, like I just did in the one that is debuting tomorrow.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

How do you feed your plotbunnies?

I feed them through the wood chipper ... my keyboard.

Problem is the scattered bunny bits regenerate into new and more aggressive bunnies that take me in directions I've never gone.

 

[TheRedLantern]

I thought I was the kind of person that didn't really have the problem of excess plot bunnies. Then I was copying some text from my wiki and, while doing so, I found a section with 6 furry critters, including one called "At The Red Lantern" which had 4 unrelated drafts of totally different stories by different POV characters told at different times (zero of which have anything to do with the story of the same name I published here). They're all like that, and most have multiple drafts that may or may not be versions of the same idea.

Some are outlines, some are drafts (one of them is 24K words long), and some are just random scenes that I wrote and intended to post to Reddit but never got around to it.

 

[NaughteeDragon]

Every so often one wanders in and actually makes itself useful. This won't be relevant for 3 chapters in a story that has 2 novel-length stories in front of it, so I figured I better trap it and fatten it up a bit.

The groomsmen were standing in line arranged by height, shortest to tallest since William, Scott’s brother and the best man, was only 5’5”. Then Odin, myself, and Thomas. Fortunately, Scott and Cindy both had the good fortune that their best friends were short. The Maid of Honor was a petite 4’11”. I hadn’t paid attention to who the bridesmaids were, I was of the opinion my job was to make sure that Scott didn’t do anything stupid at the bachelor party and make sure he got to the rehearsal and church on time. Two down, one to go.

When the bridesmaids filed in I knew I was now paying for my lack of attention to detail. Melina Antanopolis was a lovely as ever, and probably still ten times bitchier than her looks afforded her. She was walking proof that no matter how beautiful a girl is, some guy somewhere is sick and tired of putting up with her shit. They filed into place and the look on Melina’s face was almost worth the tantrum she was about to throw.

I smirked at her.

“Oh, hell no!” she practically screeched. “I love you, Cindy, but I am not spending all day with that loser. I am not having my picture taken with him, and I’m sure as fuck not dancing with him.” She at least had the good grace to look at the preacher and apologize for cursing in God’s house. I saw the look of panic on Cindy’s face and decided that I wasn’t going to make her life difficult.

I took a step back and a step to my left. I grabbed Thomas and moved him two steps to the right. Then I took the place he had been in. “You always wanted Thomas to bend you over a table anyway,” I said conversationally and just loud enough that everyone in both lines would hear it. I held a up a fist to Thomas, he bumped, but didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure if her face was red from embarrassment of anger. I hoped it was both.

I turned to the girl across from me, a very pretty black girl that was about an inch taller than I was. I extended my hand. “Hi, I’m David. I don’t think we’ve met before.” Her eyes danced with mirth as she shook my hand and introduced herself as Tasha.

Tasha “rebound queen” Jackson- tall attractive black girl. Athletic and active, likes to go to clubs. Her superpower is to walk into any room and in ten minutes be having a conversation with the one guy who is hung up on the one girl he cannot have. Her problem is that she falls for them every time.

This is for a story about a guy who has the bad taste to fall in love with his sister's wife.
If you've read my story A Different Kind of Valentine, this takes place in the May after.

 

[NaughteeDragon]

Taking a break from trying to finish a story thats been fighting me for months, I wandered the stacks and found some stories that gave me a plot idea for a train romp story. That means I now have three plotbunnies running around causing havoc in my brain. So I just wondered, how many plotbunnies do you have jumping around at any given time and how do you keep them alive as you're writing something else or in a block phase? And how many end up as stories at the end of the day?

If I can integrate into something else I'm writing I will keep them around (see above post). If I can't, I feed them just enough to let them run off and die of starvation. In practical terms it mean I give them about 3 paragraphs of mental development, and then within a couple of days my ADHD will have forgotten they were there.
I know for a fact I had an idea last Thursday that would have made a great 3-5 word scene. I thought about it long enough to give the characters names, a brief outline, and a description. I'll be damned if I can remember what it was.

 

[sirhugs]

carrots dudes...

 

[Blake_Palafox]

I don't care about managing plot ideas. I often have ideas for stories, but if I can come up with one plot, I can come up with another one, so I'm not afraid of forgetting them. I only start writing things down when I'm starting the process of writing a particular story.

 

[Yogma]

View attachment 2529881

Glad to see I'm not alone in having an "Ideas Box" folder full to overflowing

As to how many plot bunnies I have causing chaos at one time? - I generally have at least two, sometimes three active bunnies on the go at one time. One where I have completed the first draft and I'm taking a pause during one of the many editing passes, another that I will be currently writing the first draft for, and sometimes a third where I'm still at the plot planning stage.

Currently I have two I'm working on, with another four fully plotted out ready to go.

 

[RoperTrace]

View attachment 2529881

GTFO!

Now my half-dozen+ don't seem so bad. My problem since my last published story(s), is I'm easily triggered by commonplace occurrences in daily life, as a result of my adult ADHD.

Example, several months ago, I took my wife to the Hobby Lobby for her to replenish her craft supplies. As luck would have it, her materials are kept in the farthest corner of the huge store, and she walks with a cane. So finally on the way out, we came upon, a very attractive Latina, dressed to the nines, black skirt, nylon stockings, high heels. She was struggling to place three very large vases(urns?) into a std. shopping cart. I stopped and helped her load two of them into the cart, but they stood a foot or more above the top of the cart. So I told her I'd carry the third one, while she pushed the cart.
We arrived at the check-out counters, and I placed the one vase up onto the counter for the clerk. The woman told me that I was a darling, and that was the end of that. Had I been alone, I'd have offered to load them into her SUV. So that now sits with a 1000+ words waiting for me to return.

 

[StillStunned]

GTFO! Now my half-dozen+ don't seem so bad.

In the five months since I posted that screenshot, my WIP folder has grown so large that it doesn't even fit in a single screenshot anymore. And that's after I transferred all my Writing Exercise snippets to a separate folder.

This probably says something profound about the value of ideas and inspiration versus application and effort. In all that time I've only actually finished seven stories.

 

[dirk2024]

For those of us who are wrestling with several plot bunnies at one time (looking at you @NuclearFairy) This is no solution, but maybe it will help make everything okay.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Lately my plotbunnies have been acting more like gremlins that have eaten after midnight.

 

[millamomud]

Things I have already published get a date.

I keep four loose ideas as memos in a separate folder.
One older story sits at around 30k words, but I haven't touched it since August.

I also have two ideas with their own folders that I've already developed a bit, an English adaptation of my first story, and my current main project.

 

[ColtonWrites]

I'm most of the way through a long-form sci fi piece, but now that I've written all the main plot beats I got bored. Its becoming work to go back and add in the rest of the story.
I keep getting struck with ideas for new plots and turning those into shorter pieces.
Some of those turn into longer pieces. (I have one that was meant to be a quick forced proximity romance that has turned into a slow burn of almost 10k words and still going...)
I tend to wake up with plotbunnies and I have to get the basic parts down before they run away.
But I also tend to do discovery writing - I know when I start where I want the story to go (mostly) but I have no idea how I'm getting there. I learn my characters along the way, but go back and fix character development later if I have to.

 

[NoTalentHack]

In a spreadsheet, I have 400 rows of story seeds, some of them just a quote or active to build a story around, occasionally with a short note that no longer makes sense to me. Of these, about 20 have at least a few hundred words of actual story written, with some up to 10K or so, and then maybe another 20 that I’ve scrapped and used for parts.

 

[GemmaGemmaGemma]

For those of us who are wrestling with several plot bunnies at one time (looking at you @NuclearFairy) This is no solution, but maybe it will help make everything okay.


View attachment 2578637

My partner had a shirt like this years ago and I didn't even know it was a Pokemon reference. Many years later I wrote Pokemon smut. Life really is beautiful

 

[Writer61]

I tend to follow them far enough to draft a rough outline. Then, try to return to my planned list of stories (I mostly write series).

As Graf Helmut von Moltke (the elder) said, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Recently, an idea for the 2026 'Tales from the Orient' event has taken over.

 

[dirk2024]

My partner had a shirt like this years ago and I didn't even know it was a Pokemon reference. Many years later I wrote Pokemon smut. Life really is beautiful

I didn't know it was a Pokemon thing...or that there was Pokemon Smut. I saw this and thought of Pink Floyd's album, Dark Side of the Moon. And plot bunnies...yeah. that was it.

 

[EmilyMiller]

How do you feed your plotbunnies?​

My draft folder currently has twelve entries - I’m an amateur compared to @StillStunned. What I often do if struck by an idea is to write 1 - 2,000 words, and maybe a summary of the story or just the ending. Then, when I come back to it, I’m not scratching my head about the details.

If I’m in the middle of a novella or something longer, I might actually just go write the new idea as a helpful break from the longer work.

 

[UnexpectedLuggage]

I have story ideas written down in Google docs, so when an idea pops into my head for one I just pull up the document, add another note, and go about my day.

 

[onehitwanda]

I starve the little shits.

 

[Bamagan]

Taking a break from trying to finish a story thats been fighting me for months, I wandered the stacks and found some stories that gave me a plot idea for a train romp story. That means I now have three plotbunnies running around causing havoc in my brain. So I just wondered, how many plotbunnies do you have jumping around at any given time and how do you keep them alive as you're writing something else or in a block phase? And how many end up as stories at the end of the day?

I freeze mine in carbonite and hang them on the wall of my palace, near the rancor pit.

 

[OddLove]

I let them run around freely in my head until they either run away or they become more vivid and detailed. It helps to give myself time to be bored also. Cause when I'm not socializing or distracting myself with movies and TV, I like to imagine the characters in different situations to see how they'd react, then when it tells a compelling story I can put that in a future entry/chapter/episode/whatever.