Lesson 1- Assignment 1

I choose #12, Research.
Research something you’ve always wanted to know about by checking a book out of the library or looking it up on the internet. As you read, write down any ideas that come to you for a new plot.

I am always interested in learning about new things, and the first thing that comes to mind is intuition and things that go along with it…E.S.P., fortune-telling, tarot card reading. Are they tricks? Do some people (or all of us) really have a sixth sense, a part of our brain or “gut” that helps us make decisions? Can we develop it or learn it? Does Feng Shui work? Do crystals have magical powers? Is there a particular crystal that can be powerful for one person and not another? Can a color determine how your day is going? Do colors in your wardrobe determine your personality or vice versa? What magical things have power over us or is the power within us?

My mind keeps coming back to tarot cards…how and if they can give insight into your future? A middle-aged woman goes to a psychic for a reading. The psychic lays out the four queens, one of each suit, and tells her to select the one to which she feels closest. She picks wands. The psychic places the other queens back into the deck and lays the significant queen on the table facing the woman. She asks the woman to shuffle the deck, faces down, while focusing on the question she wants answered. Then the woman is told to lay the cards face down and cut them in a specific order into three separate piles. The reader, in a different order, reassemblies the cards into one stack again. The psychic then reveals a certain number of cards, drawing from the top of the deck, and studies them.

What happens next? Does the psychic suddenly refuse to do a reading? Does she do a reading and the woman is terrified? Does she do a reading and the woman suspects she is a fraud? Do the cops raid the establishment for some reason? Does the woman believe the reading and cause the foretelling events to happen? Does the woman search out another medium? Is the woman ill, in an abuseful relationship, about to be in an accident? Does she continue to return to the psychic, seeking more and more answers to questions, until she is destitute?


I used research because it is a method I use often to come up with a story idea…but, of course, first, I have to think of something new I am interested in learning about. I continue to use it because I feel it does work for me. It combines two things that are enjoyable to me, learning and writing, and I think that is why it works for me.