Playing alone

Lidia closes her notebook, her hand resting on it a moment. The chapterChaptera stretch of adventure that rises, peaks and falls away. A convenience of storytelling: no mechanism depends on it, and it is most often recognized afterward.part 3 is done; she watches it unroll again.

A confession first. At one point, she cheated: her character cast a difficult spell and she let him succeed, without testing it, in a hurry to get there. She notes it in the margin, for next time: test when failure can happen, instead of chasing the success. That was where the sceneScenethe unit of play: you open it, you play it, you close it.part 3 was breathing, and she deprived herself of it.

A satisfaction next. The dialogue with her brother: she did not feed him his answers. She played him from his own words, a coinCointhe oracle of closed questions: heads the first pole, tails the second. It never resolves an action.part 1 to decide when she hesitated, a draw when she no longer knew. The brother said things she had not foreseen, and that is how she knew him to be alive.

One scene only, tonight, but inhabited. The rest can waitWaitan open question that nobody else is looking into: it belongs to you, it ripens, it has the right never to close.part 8: she is already thinking about it, and it will be for another time.

Playing solo, nothing answers you or resists you, except chance and yourself. Here are the last gestures that make a game hold.

◆ The spirit of the game

Playing solo, no rule is watching you: you are the only judge, and you can get around everything. Always taking the card that reassures, only declaring wagersWagerwhat fate can take, named in two clauses just before you resolve: what it takes, what happens if it does not take it. What you wager must belong on the standing page or the portrait.part 6 that do not pinch, running to fateFatewhat comes in when you keep a major at the opening, and by no other door: the moment stops being ordinary. What it closes, only it can open.part 6 without ever wanting anything, nothing stops you. But remember what you are looking for: not to win, but for a moment to come alive. Every time you optimize, you trade intensity for safety, and safety, here, tastes of boredom. The only cheating possible in solo play is depriving yourself of what makes a scene vibrate. So play against your comfort, never against the rules: they ask only to be forgotten. Fun is the engine — and interesting does not mean comfortable: better the hollow, emptied scepter than the scepter that hums at exactly the right moment.

◆ No draw is pure

You have held the two rules since part 3; here is what lies underneath.

A card does not produce fiction: it sets down a state, and it is you who dress it. The Five of Cups never said “a woman dressed in black” — it said something damaged; the woman is you. Interpreting is already deciding. It cannot be otherwise, and it is not a fault. So the question is not draw or invent: you always invent. It is gentler than that. Where do you need chance to come and contradict you?

◆ Draw to surprise yourself

Not everything is drawn for, and the border is finer than a plain “uncertain / known.” Draw forDraw for / draw againsta card read on the side you already know to be true. It no longer says whether, it says what — and the side must be true before the draw.part 4 what can create a tension or surprise you. People often think that questioning chance will make a fine idea fall flat: it is the opposite. The draw always does one of two things. It validates your idea, and it stops being an author’s whim and becomes legitimate, earned. Or it invalidates it, and out of that refusal comes another idea, almost always less conventional, less naive than the first. In doubt, one rule decides: draw for what you would be afraid to decide alone, wherever you are nursing a secret wish about the outcome. Chance protects you there from yourself.

◆ An idea you draw for — the masked man

An intuition comes to me; I submit it to chance, which refuses it and gives me back the same threat by another door.

An image arrives on its own: at a bend in the street, a masked man. Wait — that one, I draw for. Is there anyone in this street? Tails. Nobody.

The street is empty. Not a footstep, not an open shutter, and yet something is off.

What is left is the unease, of which I know nothing. I draw to find out what makes me uncomfortable, one card read on the against side since it is an unease I am looking for: the Five of Swords.

Voices, further off, a burst of argument going wrong.

I come back to my first intuition — there is indeed a threat — but it arrives by a more interesting door than the masked man I had to hand.

◆ Decide when not to draw

Decide when an idea seems to you too strong, or too slight, to be submitted to chance. Some come to you and carry you away, untie a threadThreadthe tension running from one scene to the next: what stays open when a scene closes, and calls up the following one.part 8, bring matter you feel to be right: drawing for them would break the rhythm, or risk breaking what they offer. Keep them, even if you draw for the details to make them precise. Others, conversely, are purely decorative: a backdropBackdropwhat you come across and forget: pure color, nothing to note. A Backdrop can rise the day you notice that it wants something.part 7, a light, a smell are not drawn for, they are set down. (For what is wanted, an object or a knowledge you do not have and that is not set down but obtained, see What he wants, part 11.)

◆ An idea you decide — the letter

An idea too fine to risk: I keep it, and leave only its shape to chance.

My hand finds a letter at the bottom of my pocket: my sister slipped it there, to tell me what she did not dare say in front of the others. Do I draw for that one? No, too fine, and it unties a thread that has been trailing for three scenes; drawing for it would risk breaking it. I keep it.

The paper is folded in four, warm from having stayed against me all day. It is her handwriting.

But I draw for its detail: does she tell me everything, there, in the letter? Tails. No.

Three lines, and not one more: a place, an hour, “come alone.”

The idea is mine; it is its shape I leave to chance.

◆ A decorative idea — nothing to draw for

A scene played in which not one card leaves the deck: a backdrop is not drawn for, it is set down.

I sit down on the terrace of an old stone café. Nothing to ask: not the coin (what truth would there be to decide?), nor a card, since nothing that came would change what I am going to do.

The wisteria climbs to the parasols and falls back in blue-violet clusters; a fountain, a few steps away, draws the sparrows. The air is spring-like, sunlit, quiet.

I set down the backdrop, I breathe, and I go on.

◆ The cost of a draw

What adds folds in within a second; what replaces reconfigures the whole scene, and you have to rebuild. Same gesture, same card, two fatigues with nothing in common. Hence the second rule, which completes the first: draw without counting what adds; weigh what replaces. That is why you can populatePopulate · widen · hook · probethe four families of question: who is there and how he is (coin) · what exists just beyond the frame (card) · what is off (card) · staying with the answer that has already fallen. (parts 1 and 2) a place with five cards in a row without effort, while five questions about what you are pursuing exhaust you.

◆ When rhythm comes first

Submitting everything to chance may seem the pure version of the game: it is often the exhausting version. By wagering everything, you manage more possibilities than you play, you revise your plans constantly, and the scene stops breathing. So decide, and move on. You may get a flatter scene (less surprise, less resistance), and that is not serious: a game does not have to be a run of reversals. The draw is encouraged, not owed. What is being sought here is an inhabited world, not a counter of surprises.

And know this: that boundary is never sharp. It is a measure taken instant by instant, which you learn to read on your own feeling: the more you play, the more the hand knows of itself when to consult and when to decide.

◆ Asking beside the point

A draw always answers the question you asked, never the one you had in mind. You want to know why that woman opened her door; you ask what she will do tomorrow. The card falls, it falls true, you write it down, and something is left on your hands. It is not the draw that failed: you asked beside the point.

You cannot spot it in the wording, you spot it afterward: the answer is good and you are left hungry. That is the only reliable signal, and it is quickly recognized.

Do not draw again on the spot. The question you asked has had its answer, and it holds; loading the oracle again on the same subject is asking it to agree with you. Note down instead what you really wanted to know, why did she open her door to me?, and leave it on the standing pageStanding pagethe page that keeps what is pending: living actors, waits, stakes, desires under way, doors closed by fate. There is only one, and it replaces the previous one.part 8. You have just turned a missed question into a wait, and it will ripen better than the other one (part 8).

◆ The compass — when the page empties

Sometimes you no longer know what to do: the scene is set, and nothing comes. Facing the coin, the difficulty was knowing what to ask (part 1); here it is barer: what to do. The four suitsSuits (the four)Wands/Fire, what cannot wait · Cups/Water, what comes back · Swords/Air, the line that separates · Pentacles/Earth, what remains. They say a card’s matter, and how you acted.part 4 do not only say how one acts: they also say what one turns toward. Go around them as around a compass. Each one is a bearing that starts from you.

• Fire (Wands) — what you are burning to attempt, here, now; the ambition that goes forward.
• Air (Swords) — what you need to understand: the doubt to cut through, the calculation that lights the way, or that jams it.
• Water (Cups) — whom you turn toward; what you feel, the bondBondwhat an actor seems to expect of you, written on the standing page and never crossed out: you stack, you do not correct.part 7 that calls you.
• Earth (Pentacles) — what you refuse to let go of: to hold, to protect, to build.

And if you need a fifth bearing, the sidestep: the door that did not exist a second earlier, the idea with no reason, what a majorMajor Arcanumone of the twenty-two named cards, from The Fool to The World. It does not answer: it names, and it weighs.parts 2, 4, 6 does when it falls.

Take the suit that lights up, or the least expected: it is often that one that reopens the scene. It is not an obligatory step, only a hand held out when you are lost.

The page stays blank. I go around: Fire, nothing; Air, nothing; Water, there, something. Whom do I turn toward? Toward my sister, whom I have not called back since the quarrel. The scene starts again on its own: I am going to find her.

The sidestep belongs to the instant alone: it founds nothing, it reopens a scene.

◆ Dialogue

The risk of solo play: playing both voices from the same head, writing what the other would say if it were useful, not what he would really say. The counter: play the other from his keywords, not from your intentions. If you do not know how he reacts, put a coin, then play from the answer, not toward it.

“You do not have to do this.” — “I know.” — that line was not planned; it changed the scene.

◆ Writing to slow down

You can play aloud, you can write short, four words for a scene, if you like; the notebook does not have to become a chore. But writing does one thing that speech does not: it fixes. It fixes the thought, it fixes the conversation, it fixes the state of the world, where the voice passes and fades. And this game lives on things that have to be fixed in order to weigh: the card you read and then breathe, the wait or the stakeStakean open question on which somebody else is making progress: it does not forget itself, and it does not ripen on its own.parts 8, 10, the meta noteMeta notewhat you know and your character does not, set aside on the standing page. It is often that which strings the story tight.part 8, the wager declared first.

Writing is therefore not only a support: it is a metronome. The time it takes to write a line is the time to ask yourself whether that is really what the other would say, and that time is exactly the slowness the game asks for. The voice sets down; the pen anchorsAnchor (to)to enter an actor on the standing page: not for what he is, for what he wants.part 7.

◆ When the notebook contradicts itself

A long game contradicts itself. The coat was red six chapters ago, it is black tonight; the city was three days’ walk away, it is an hour by air. This does not happen because you play badly: you write over months, you decide fast, and the notebook fixes the mistakes too. Three ways of handling it, none better than the others.

Leave it. The coat was red, it is black, never mind. Most inconsistencies are not worth a minute of your evening, and nobody rereads.

Justify it. The coat turns red under a certain light, and there is a world a little stranger than before. It is the most tempting of the three, and the only one that costs: make a reflex of it and you spend your scenes explaining your world, and an explained world stops weighing. Keep it for the times when the explanation pleases you more than the mistake.

Settle it. The coat is black, it always has been. Do not go back: the old pages will say red, and that is quite all right. You no more correct a contradiction than you correct a portraitPortraitwhat you write about someone, actor or character: a name, what he wants, his suits, and what he carries when that says who he is. Without any count, and never corrected — you write a fresh one, further on.parts 7, 11 (part 8). A notebook that contradicts itself over time looks like a memory; a notebook taken up line by line looks like a file.

There remains one gesture, for the day the thing that jars interests you: settle nothing at all. Why did I see it red, that evening? Onto the standing page, with the rest of what pends. That one is not for a coat; it holds when the inconsistency bears on something you have no wish to lose.

◆ Skipping time

Not every hour of a life gets played. When time has to pass (the road up to the city, the night before the meeting, the three days a reply takes to come), tell it in three sentences, or skip: the coin crosses told time without playing it. The ellipsis is not a shameful shortcut: it is what gives weight to what you do choose to play. You can even skip over an event whose outcome you do not know, and let a wait occupy the void.

What calls for it is the need to move on, and that need comes almost always out of tension: nothing is pending there, nobody is waiting on an answer, and the scene that would come would be played on nothing at all. The ellipsis makes time pass; it does not defuse. So a scene you have no appetite for is not thereby a scene to skip: most often, you believe it already written, and a scene you believe you know is precisely the one that has not yet been played.

There is a third door: look elsewhere. A scene far from him, one that moves nothing forward at all, a breather (part 9). The world, for its part, rarely waits until you feel like it.

◆ The future that never happened

There comes a moment when the game has produced enough matter for an order to form on its own inside your head. You did not decide it; it is simply there, and it looks like this.

First I have to get out of the lower city, then see Sybia again, then find someone to help me clear my name — and the mender is bound to come to me sooner or later, and…

You recognize it by what it does to the writing. Tonight’s scene seems to lag behind what you already know, every gesture becomes a step to get through before the next one, and your hand grows impatient. You are running inside your own story, and nothing you write there looks equal to the plan.

It is not the standing page that puts you there. What is left pending, you wrote down so as to stop having to think about it, and it ripens without you (part 8). A list does not ripen: it waits to be carried out, in order, and any scene that fails to advance it feels wasted.

And the ellipsis will not get you out of it. Skipping over a step looks like it settles everything, but the skip is not for that: it makes time pass when nothing is pending, not when something weighs. Used against a list, it simply sets you down further along it: one line fewer, the rest intact. It was not the scene that needed skipping, it was the plan that needed erasing.

The one who drew it up is the Game Master left in you, the one who prepares, who links one thing to the next, who has already seen the ending. Drive them out. See the list for what it is, and erase that future: it never happened. Nothing is written, so nothing is charted.

Then come back to your character, to the moment he is standing in, to what is in front of him. Feel the world around him, and let it surprise you: that is what you came for.

◆ One scene is enough

You do not have to “advance” in order to have played. One single scene, well inhabited, is a whole session. Set your notebook down afterward owing nothing more. Solo play has no clock, and that is a trap: lacking a session that starts and stops, you begin measuring your game in scenes cleared, and measuring in distance is running. So change your unit. What you are looking for is not the number of scenes behind you, it is the depth of the one you have just lived. One fine long scene is worth more than five dispatched. Take the chapter up tomorrow. It will only ripen the better for having waited.