[Bunny #4] Post your stucks-

[kalloway]

It happens to all of us. The wall of stuck. The wall of stuck can manifest in a lot of ways. It can come in the form of realizing a plotbunny was really a premise!bunny and there's nowhere for the story to go because there isn't actually much of a story. It can be canon giving a firm backhand. It can be wholly external. It can be a scathing review or even an unintentional comment from a well-meaning friend. It can be an epic decision or a non-epic decision or everything or nothing.

What has gotten you stuck? What has gotten you unstuck?


My stucks are usually... premise bunnies, prompts that seemed interesting at the time, over-excitement and not planning. And character names. I have an entire shelf of baby name books and that makes things worse...

My unstuck methods are all over the place - working on a different section of the story, putting in placeholders for the bits that stuck, making lists of what might be in a character's fridge to get me thinking about them in general, reviewing canon, long walks by the water, imaginary conversation while at the grocery store...

Post your stucks and your unstucks!

If you would like. Perhaps another community member can offer you suggestions to unstick yourself. You do not have to.


This is also a weekly check-in! You do not have to check in, of course, but if you would like to comment on the last week, feel free!

If you have a deadline coming up, you can do it!

Comments

[radondoran]

I'm stuck right now on two plot bunnies that actually turned out to be premise bunnies. (Actually, I think most of my plot bunnies are really premise bunnies, but usually I don't write plotty fic so it isn't a problem.) Curiously enough, I think it won't be too hard to work out a plot for the longer fic--it's going to be a long pastiche, so I should be able to construct a plot systematically, if that makes sense? It's just a matter of sitting down and applying myself.

But I'm really stuck on the shorter fic. I know some of what happens, and I have a pretty good handle on the POV character's emotional arc... but in order for it to come together, I need to come up with some kind of clever problem or puzzle along the lines of what the characters face in canon. Without an external case-type problem to turn things on, none of the other stuff I've worked out really has a raison d'être.

I'm probably doing this backwards, haha. Probably you're supposed to come up with the actual main conflict first and then the secondary stuff.

[pebblerocker]

Oh, mystery and police-type fics must be so complicated to build. Some writers manage to pull off something as plotty as a real episode and I'm in awe. How do they do it? Sorry I can't help...

[kalloway]

How much of the 'case' do you really need to put into the fic? You could go with something pretty basic if it just needs to be happening but in the background and isn't super important to the rest of the character development.

If you're comfy doing so, you can make your own post, too, asking for suggestions.