Progress, of a sort; premise bunnies?

[owlmoose]

The Dragon Age Kiss Battle is still going! Many prompts and excellent stories for your perusal.

And don't forget the Final Fantasy Kiss Battle -- it got off to a bang and then suddenly slowed waaaay down, but there are still a ton of open prompts. Especially for you, Team Ifrit. Yes, you! We're in a solid second place right now, but it would be easy to catch up with just a few more fills. :D

I've written multiple fics for both battles, with ideas for more, and I also wrote a Porn Battle story which I will crosspost here eventually, and then yesterday I made actual progress on my dragonagebb story, so that was exciting. I might actually get that one done after all!

I was browsing the "finish your stories" community onedeadplotbunny, and came across this post about Premise Bunnies: story ideas that are a good premise for a story, but don't really come built in with a plot. And boy did that ever resonate. Wardens of Ivalice, for one major example: it got its start as a premise bunny (Grey Wardens come to Ivalice and fight darkspawn), and the plot has been slow in coming along the way. The Sherlock Holmes/Iron Man crossover, that's stalled at a single chapter, even more so. Most of my crossover ideas and AU ideas are premise bunnies, really, and most especially the occasional flash thoughts I get around original fiction are *always* premise bunnies. And that's even worse, because at least with fanfic premise bunnies I have existing characters and situations to work with, to eventually inspire plots. To take an origfic premise and turn it into a plot seems so daunting that I never even start. Maybe someday I'll figure it out, and maybe I won't, but at least I'm getting a better idea of what's holding me back.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

"Premise bunny" is such a good term. FWIW, there are quite a few techniques from (original) fiction writing that are used to water and fertilize premise bunnies so they grow into plot bunnies (and then outlines, and then 1st drafts). Until I started learning which of those techniques work for me, I had many original fiction premise bunnies that refused to grow into something useful, manageable, and writable. Back when I was deeply frustrated with the application of a particular technique (hero's journey) on an original novel-in-progress, I switched to writing fanfic (2007) and used fanfic as a way to try out eight different approaches/techniques for turning premises into full-on plot structures. Using someone else's world and/or characters proved useful because it kept those aspects constant (saving me time/energy) while I learned different plotting techniques and compared/contrasted them with each other.