Joely Sue Burkhart

How many times have we heard that we should write from the heart?  That we should put our hearts in our books?  There’s even a contest by the name.

I’ve got a different take: put Hearts in your books.

By Hearts, I mean the card game that is likely free on your computer, one of the few games I can think of off the top of my head where the goal is to avoid points.  I was playing Hearts the other day (one of my favorite ways to procrastinate), and thinking, sort of in a sleepy bored way.  In one game, I managed to shoot the moon three times.  And suddenly I wasn’t so sleepy.

“Shooting the moon” is a risk in the game of Hearts.  It’s nothing to take 25 of the 26 points, which hurts your score in a big way.  You can lose big, in a hurry!  But if you can manage to take all 26 points, you give your opponents 26 points instead.  Cool, huh?  And I was thinking about strategy.  How at a glance, I had to decide whether I thought I could shoot the moon or not.  I passed my three cards depending on that strategy.  I might keep entirely opposite cards if my goal was…

to play it safe.

How does this affect writing?  Are you playing it safe, following all the rules, staying under the radar, and most of all, avoiding that Queen of Spades?  Or are you taking the risk, keeping the big cards, and playing them to take it all?  I don’t know about you, but I want to take it all.  I want to shoot the moon every time I write a story.

Immediately, I started thinking about how to up the stakes, twist the plot, make everything even more extreme.  Shoot the moon.  My new motto.