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.

There is no perfect system.

Switching to someone else’s system might work for you AND it will certainly slow you down.

…Which Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t Switch Systems

My current system for revisions is, um, best described as ‘wishful thinking’.

So.

I’m sitting here trying to implement a new system for managing revisions (an area in which I am weak).

And my brain feels like it’s going to explode.

Which, in turn, makes me want to do something–anything–else.

Learning a new way to do things is hard.

Doing a thing you already know how to do isn’t necessarily easy, but learning a new way to do something…well that’s just harder. And it is going to go more slowly, at first.

So I’m sitting here trying to be kind to myself as I’m trying to implement a new system for managing revisions (an area in which I am trying to develop a system that will make it easier to do the thing in future. Not easy, but easier.)

How To Improve Your Writing Practice

For every area of your work, pick a method and master it.

• Should you draft in notebooks/Scrivener/Word/Google Docs? It doesn’t really matter. Just pick one.
• Should you keep your story ideas on notecards/an app/a single document/on scraps of paper? It doesn’t really matter. Pick a system and use it.
• Should you keep your revision notes in separate documents/a Trello board/a master file? It doesn’t really matter. Just pick one.

If your current method isn’t working, try something different, but understand,

• It will be slower, at first
• It might not be what all the cool kids are doing
• You must stick with it until it feels natural
• It might not work forever

Switching tasks taxes our brains.

The search for ‘the perfect’ system is nothing but a shell game.

The only way to win the shell game is to be the person in charge of what happens, or not to play at all.