If Shakespeare…

Hello! First to introduce myself; I’m Suzanne McLeod, author of the Spellcrackers.com urban fantasy series set in London, and I write about magic, mayhem and murder – liberally spiced with hot guys, kick-ass chicks and super-cool supes! The first three books in the series are out now, and the fourth is due out June 2012.

So, now I’ve got the shameless self-promotion out the way, I’m thrilled to be coming to Get Writing 2012, to offer a workshop on Taming your Plot Bunnies; I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun, and hope to give plenty of handy tips on keeping those pesky plot bunnies in line.

So, what are plot bunnies? Well, generally plot bunnies are those amazing ideas that jump out and insist we write them now, whether it be for fan fiction* (which is where plot bunnies originated), or as Shiny New Ideas for our own stories. And of course, plot bunnies are often of the evil persuasion, in that they always appear at the most inconvenient moments and we never have time to write them.

But really those plot bunnies are the quickest ones to tame, all we need is a handy notebook and a pen to make a brief story summary, then we can pop them safely in the writing hutch, feed them the odd inspiration carrot, and keep them for later evaluation.

It’s the other type of plot bunnies, some of which I list below, I’m going to give tips on taming.

The Beginning Plot Bunny. This one jumps around between alternative Chapter Ones, unsure which time/place/character is the right one to kickstart our story with, until soon we have a dozen Chapter Ones all vying for attention, and all of them adamant we can’t move on with our tale until we decide which one is perfect.

The Back Story Plot Bunny. This one wants to regale us with its cool past where it was the Champion Carrot Muncher at college five years in a row, or how it had a tough time making it out the seed packet, when really, it should be getting on with locating the stolen golden carrot and discovering the identity of the thief.

The Shiny New Carrot Plot Bunny: ‘Hey,’ this one shouts enthusiastically, when we’re about to start chapter five, ‘wouldn’t the story work better as a historical, or even a dystopian? Or we could add a forbidden love triangle with a parsnip? Or make all our carrots purple instead of orange? Or what about cloning them and growing them in hydroponics? Or, or, or . . .’

The Angsting Plot Bunny. This one endlessly debates whether our next chapter should visit the greengrocer’s where our hero can chance upon a clue. Or if our heroine should infiltrate the baddies’ hideout, before escaping by the last frond of her carrottop. Or maybe our hero should have some down time and go on a romantic dinner with that gorgeous hottie, Jessica Rabbit?

The Rabbit Hole Plot Bunny. This one wanders off to investigate Carrot Smuggling in Blackpool, or go Gamekeeper Hunting in Wales, instead of sticking around to solve Elmer Fudd’s vicious murder by shotgun.

The Plot Hole Plot Bunny. This one gets to The End, then pops its head up and says, ‘Hey, we saved the carrot patch and rescued Roger Rabbit, but who killed that gardener whose corpse we dug up in Chapter Two?

I hope you’ve enjoyed our short wander into the Plot Bunny field and that it’s given you a taster for the workshop. So why not come along to Get Writing 2012 and find out how ‘Taming your Plot Bunnies’ can give your stories a helping paw, err sorry, hand. Carrots and bunny ears optional!

*Fan Fic: Hmm, let’s say Spock from Star Trek and Hermione Granger from Harry Potter get together for some sort of adventure – well, the ‘knows everything’ Hermione and logical Spock should make a great pair, and get along famously, right? This idea brought to you by the Lack of Character Conflict Plot Bunny.

Mike French writes, I’ll be running a workshop at the Get Writing 2012 conference called A Writerʼs Guide to Blogging and the Social Networks. I thought it would be good to lay some groundwork for this workshop and so here are some helpful things to know and a glimpse at some of the material beforehand.
Firstly this: publishing has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most writers are unhappy for pretty much all of the time. This is largely because they don’t get invited to parties and nobody reads their books.
Secondly: many writers have been increasingly of the opinion that they’ve all made a big mistake in writing novels in the first place. And some say that even writing short stories and writing their names on the back of their shirts was a bad move and they should never have picked up a pen and so on and so forth.
However now the problem has been largely done away with chiefly due to the Writer’s Guide to Blogging Workshops which have already supplanted the great On Writing workshop run by Sir Stephen King as the standard way to help writers get invited to parties and to get their books to an audience, for though it teaches much that is nonsense, it scores over the older, more pedestrian workshops in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper to attend; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC in large friendly letters at the start of the powerpoint.
The Writer’s Guide to Blogging workshop has a few things to say on the subject of blogs. A blog, it teaches, is about the most massively useful thing a writer can have. Partly it has great potential to reach an audience but more importantly if a publisher (publisher: nonauthor) discovers that a writer has a blog, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a twitter account, facebook profile, synopsis, blurb, fan base, a potential bestseller ms in the top drawer, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. What the publisher will think is that any writer that can struggle against terrible time pressures to run a blog, win through and still know how to use a hash tag in twitter, is clearly a writer to be reckoned with and will award them with a publishing contract (Publishing contract: golden ticket.)
Of course many authors don’t like this and complain that it gets in the way of the actual writing and assume that they are more intelligent than writers that blog because they had achieved so much — War & Peace, The Lord of the Rings, 1984, The IKEA catalogue and so on — whilst all the bloggers ever do is muck about in cyberspace having a good time. But conversely, the bloggers believe they are far more intelligent — for precisely the same reasons as all the mucking about translates into their books being read across the planet. ( Planet: lots of readers. )
Of course due to time constraints and legal reasons the workshop is often condensed into one statement. Which is this:
Blogging: mostly harmless.
At such times it is customary to sing The Verulam Writers’ Chanting song before heading down to the bar. See you there!

You can find Mike’s blog here and you can buy his book The Ascent of Isaac Steward for Kindle here.