The Pitfalls of Jenga

Building a story is like building a Jenga Tower. You start with a base, and pile the ideas on in a self-indulgent excercise just as you inflate your confidence, smiling all the way.

Then you start removing blocks, ideas that are unfounded, unnecessary. You replace them in another way, or not at all.

But the tower, though ever closer to its maximum attainable height, grows ever unstable!

It's full of holes, gaps you can't fill, and is leaning ever further from its original goal, until it becomes inflated into a trilogy brimming with original characters nopony wants to read about anyway. When the overarching goal of the story is finally revealed, it's not so much a friendly sucker punch as a seemingly random afterthought.

Next thing you know, you're sitting dejectedly amidst a pile of Jenga blocks, all that remain of your creative campaign. Once and for all, you determinedly pack them up and shove them to the back of your conceptual library.

This is exactly what happened to me today.

I just dug out another Jenga set.
Let's hope this one proves more promising.