Plot Bunnies And Plot Holes

A tale of writing

Flexibility is necessary in outlining. You want to be able to shift which character is the main one if necessary, what the technology level is, how long it lasts, and anything else needed.

And as you have ideas, they will act and react and require shifting.

You do have feel out, as in a puzzle, that if this goes here, then that must go there, and the other thing will result.

The thing is that while a puzzle was constructed so that it is guaranteed that you can logically work out the pieces, there is no such thing with a plot bunny. A writer can sit there with the knowledge that this, that, and the other thing will all affect each other, but not what any of them are.

Sometimes you are stuck trying to laboriously invent things.

I have a tale. The intrigues of the kingdom throw two characters together, despite the characters’ being of no significance to the intrigues.

Well, having been of no significance to the intrigues. No one will believe it after they got enmeshed in the mess.

What’s worse, if they had avoided the mess, it would probably have made no difference at all to the lives either of them lived, no matter who won. They would even have been buffered from armed conflict.

(Is there going to be actually armed conflict? I ponder. Probably not. At least, not more than skirmishes with plausible deniability. Some of which may actually be bandits who got mistaken for partisans, perhaps. But I have yet to fix that in stone.)

So, the turmoil had thrown them together, and they scrambled to survive, and the story did not jell.

I poked. Then I poked some more. Then I concluded -- I had to draw up the rivalries, and who was on the side of which prince, and why.

I had already decided that, while it starts with three princes (for important reasons), one of them would die quickly. Somewhat after that, I decided that the king would be ineffectual in curbing -- well, anything. So we were down to two princes.

But -- the two characters aren’t interested in the factions supporting each prince, as such.

Still, the factions were interested in them.

Foolishly, perhaps. Accidentally, certainly. But interested.

I fall back and start to consider the kingdom in terms of the sort of economic and geographical questions that would be central to world-building without reference to a story. One villainess in the story revealed herself as a part of a powerful merchant city and also as a noblewoman. (The other nobles sniff at trade. She consoles herself with being rich enough to buy the lot of them.)

Then I consider feuds. They can even be figurative, despite the era. Much easier to say that these nobles took opposite sides over a dispute over land because of an heiress who was promised to one noble and married off to another three generations ago, and they are still angling over the land. Considerably simpler than thrashing out what goods and what trades they engage in, in their lands.

Plus, the king had two queens, the mother of the first prince, and the mother of the one who dies early and his twin. The desire for alliance with the different kingdoms involved has its motives among the nobles who support one or the other.

And meanwhile, I consider magic. The heroine is unique -- but only in her school of magic. There’s lots of magic about. If only for her to get lost in the clutter. Unkind souls will say that her magic is unique because only a silly goose would want to learn it --

It’s not ivory-tower magic. Many nobles know magic, many soldiers, many merchants, many farmers. Not to the degree that all of them would be ascribed to this school or that one, to be sure. (I still have to decide whether it’s possible to learn a grab-bag of spells from different schools.)

So this affects the possibilities of combat, the difficulties of trade (and the wealth of it), the prosperity of farmland and pastures, and many more things that affect all the issues in the factions.

The only thing that’s required is that no school of magic can ease travel much, or grant forms of communication that move more swiftly than the most swift form of travel.

And I have to sketch in something, so that the two of them can stumble in, around, and (finally) out of the convolutions.

It’s no use thinking that it’s whatever is convenient to make their lives difficult. A lot of things could make their lives difficult.

There is only throwing ideas about and hoping to start plot bunnies from cover. Sometimes they leap up.