The Writing Shell Game

Every time I’m in a city I see a man drawing passersby into a shell game.

He’ll have a tiny card table set up. three folded cards on top, or three tiny cups, and he’s shuffling them around, talking fast, and convincing someone to play ‘guess where the ball is now’.

It’s deceptively simple: just follow the ball, and win some money.

We all think we can do that. But the secret is that we are playing a different game from the operator of the con. We expect him to play fair. He knows that the game is to cheat. We only find the ball when he wants us to.

I’m always astonished that there is anyone left in the world who thinks they can win at a shell game.

Pick a Method, Any Method

The writing world is rife with shell games. Someone promising us the perfect system for drafting, for revising, for getting published…but the truth is, they are not promising a system that will work for us, only what worked once or twice for them.

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Writing Prompt – Under The Weather

Today’s Story Spark/Writing Prompt is an example of how you can use events from your real life (I was really under the weather, as you can hear).

There are lots of events we’d rather not live through in our lives. Why not exorcise the demons, by inflicting them on our characters.

Things going to easily for your character, as they scale the rockface to rescue the kitten? Make them do it while battling a nasty head cold! Boss cut back your hours? Throw the same challenge at your protagonist and let them act out your wildest revenge fantasies or let them be the best, most resourceful version that you hope you will be. Inspire yourself!

Keep writing!