One Dead Vocabulary
Feb. 10th, 2013 07:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kalloway posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
onedeadplotbunnyOver the years, other authors and myself have managed to define a few of our writer-ly problems with snappy new terminology. ^_^
Premise Bunny: a true curse, these. While a plot bunny is something like 'I should write a fic about Wendy and Ronnie having grand adventures in space fighting giant robots built by Emperor von Alphabet while mending their broken relationship which fixes that mess in Episode 38...', a premise bunny is closer to 'I should write a fic about Wendy and Ronnie having an adventure...' Even worse is when that fic gets started and has nowhere to go because it was just a premise and there isn't really anything else to go on.
Sometimes, plot bunnies and premise bunnies are very difficult to tell apart!
Binog: A story that was written as fanfiction but would have been a thousand times better written as original fiction, either because of characterization, situation, or a hundred other elements that just made the whole thing feel like reading about characters with the same names as the fandom characters even though it was obviously an original story. Different from 'cardboard cut-outs' in that the general story is fairly good - it's just Not Really Fanfic.
These can and often should be re-purposed as original fiction if caught early enough in the process.
Diaglog: When a story gets bogged down at some point because characters either won't shut up or the action has run into a rut with no current hope of getting out of it. Often located several months after a story is shuffled silently into the WiP folder and subsequently ignored. Characterized by a sudden realization of 'if you'd just say/do this, you could go over there and this fic/chapter would be over!' and speedy editing/writing to make it so.
With practice, diaglog becomes apparent as it's being written and can be excised immediately.
Diaglog can also manifest as 'oh, this actually only needed a couple of paragraphs added and it's done! how did this escape me before?'
Premise Bunny: a true curse, these. While a plot bunny is something like 'I should write a fic about Wendy and Ronnie having grand adventures in space fighting giant robots built by Emperor von Alphabet while mending their broken relationship which fixes that mess in Episode 38...', a premise bunny is closer to 'I should write a fic about Wendy and Ronnie having an adventure...' Even worse is when that fic gets started and has nowhere to go because it was just a premise and there isn't really anything else to go on.
Sometimes, plot bunnies and premise bunnies are very difficult to tell apart!
Binog: A story that was written as fanfiction but would have been a thousand times better written as original fiction, either because of characterization, situation, or a hundred other elements that just made the whole thing feel like reading about characters with the same names as the fandom characters even though it was obviously an original story. Different from 'cardboard cut-outs' in that the general story is fairly good - it's just Not Really Fanfic.
These can and often should be re-purposed as original fiction if caught early enough in the process.
Diaglog: When a story gets bogged down at some point because characters either won't shut up or the action has run into a rut with no current hope of getting out of it. Often located several months after a story is shuffled silently into the WiP folder and subsequently ignored. Characterized by a sudden realization of 'if you'd just say/do this, you could go over there and this fic/chapter would be over!' and speedy editing/writing to make it so.
With practice, diaglog becomes apparent as it's being written and can be excised immediately.
Diaglog can also manifest as 'oh, this actually only needed a couple of paragraphs added and it's done! how did this escape me before?'
no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 09:01 pm (UTC)Binog is a typo of 'bingo', typed by a friend while I was whining about finding a fic with an amazing summary that should have been awesome, but yeah... also should have been original fiction. She meant to agree with my summation and instead created a new word. ^^;;
Same with diaglog, though that was a different friend. Something about getting painfully stuck with some dialogue at the end of a chapter, iirc. But it came out as diaglog and has been in use ever since. (And she managed to hack it down, tack on a couple of paragraphs and have a much better chapter-end, too.)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-14 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 10:35 pm (UTC)(My story premise file: it's pretty much where great ideas go to die, ahahaha.)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-10 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-12 04:09 am (UTC)Premise bunnies happen to me all the time in the form of dynamic bunnies. Like, "I want to write something about [a character who has these certain traits] and their epic adventure/life-long rivalry/super-hot sex/etc. with [a character who has these other traits.] Do I know which characters? A plot to tie this together? Of course not!
Binogs seem to be the case with a lot of AU fics. I hope to rework some old AU ideas into original fic.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-12 01:29 pm (UTC)Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much. And go you! I did that a few years ago and even sold it! (And I don't think anyone would ever figure out what it was an AU fanfic bunny of, either.)