Finishing Fics... Finally

(Pretty much copied from last year because hey, it still works~)

So you may have noticed a few new terms popping up...

Now we all know what a plotbunny is - it's that story idea that chomps onto your brain and bothers you while driving, at school, at work, before sleep, in the shower, etc. It is brilliant and if you could just hook a USB cable straight into your brain, you'd be all set.

Less ferocious are Premise Bunnies. Premise Bunnies often pretend to be plotbunnies and on first glance, they can be impossible to tell apart! Sometimes, Premise Bunnies actually turn into plotbunnies through ~magic~.

But what is a Premise Bunny?

A Premise Bunny is a true curse. Premise Bunnies are often distinguished by their vague characteristics, such as 'Bob/Wendy have an adventure' and lack of a general narrative. A plotbunny would be closer to 'Bob/Wendy having grand adventures in space fighting giant robot pirates and helping Emperor von Alphabet reclaim his throne while slowly mending their broken relationship after the events of Episode 43'.

The worst thing that can happen with a Premise Bunny is that it turns into a WiP that goes nowhere, because there was never a plot behind it, only a premise.

Premise Bunnies are best fed time and ideas until they magically become proper plotbunnies, though often, unfortunately, many also have to be released back to the wild as well.

I sometimes think premise bunnies breed under my bed, considering how many I seem to have, but those are actually dust bunnies and I should vacuum.

Over 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?'