Rabbit Hole is a descriptive, imagination inspiring term used to describe most of what I waste time on every day. When I get a taste of new information, I jump feet first into the hole and follow every winding tunnel of knowledge. Those tunnels almost always have their own smaller tunnels, and I follow them as well. I can spend days, weeks, even months studying something as useful as human history, or as ridiculous as what’s the best font to use in a manuscript (It’s Garamond).

Here’s a little example of one rabbit hole I recently enjoyed. I wanted to write a scene where the United States military detonates a low yield nuclear weapon over a Texas desert in an attempt to kill a threat to the nations security. I spent nearly a week learning about nuclear fusion as it pertains to the detonation of fissile material inside a cruise missile. By the time I was done, I had two highly technical, very boring, pages written describing, in great detail, the journey of an atom as it’s squashed by an expanding a foam blanket.

Those pages were fun to write, but ended up in the trash folder. I removed them entirely because they didn’t make the story better. The Rabbit Hole rarely results in entertaining prose.

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