{"id":25666,"date":"2022-10-21T03:00:36","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T10:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/?p=25666"},"modified":"2022-10-13T02:35:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T09:35:46","slug":"get-your-next-story-moving-use-stikhomanteia-the-ancient-greek-divination-technique-by-chloe-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/21\/get-your-next-story-moving-use-stikhomanteia-the-ancient-greek-divination-technique-by-chloe-holiday\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Your Next Story Moving! Use Stikhomanteia, The Ancient Greek Divination Technique! by Chloe Holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Get<\/a>Today we welcome a new guest writer to Writer\u2019s Fun Zone, Chloe Holiday who is stopping by to chat with us about \u201cGet Your Next Story Moving! Use Stikhomanteia, The Ancient Greek Divination Technique!\u201d Enjoy!<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Writer\u2019s block comes in all flavors but the absolute worst has to be experiencing gridlock at the start.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A completely blank page– and mind!– mocks you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you could only get going, it would prime the pump, and words would flow, but right now, you might as well be in the Sahara of Prose.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the opposite can be just as bad<\/strong>: a cascading deluge of ideas all clamoring for attention, enough that a writer can be swept away by indecision.<\/span><\/p>\n

This happened to me when I first decided to write my first Romance. My brain swirled with plots, too many to reel in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Where to start?<\/span><\/h2>\n

After an embarrassing number of days getting nowhere, I finally in desperation wrote down all the tropes and character types on slips of paper, put them in bowls, for the storyline, hero, and heroine, and drew a few out: Rich Foreign Alpha Male, Repressed Young Woman, Workplace Romance, and Travel Romance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All of a sudden, I had a starting point.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The technique might sound limiting, but instead was weirdly freeing. I could shut up my inner critic with \u201cthe Fates decree it\u201d and get on with writing instead of second-guessing myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was the barest of skeletons<\/strong>, yet it became <\/span>Helios<\/span><\/i><\/a>\u2014and ultimately a series\u2014which received reviews like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Holiday managed to walk the line of a harlequin romance while offering bits of a third wave feminism into the mix – it would make for a fascinating literary study. The writing is crisp, fun to read, and perfectly crafted toward the ideal audience of this type of book. It fits the one-sitting read that many romances hang their hats upon, and offers that transportive, foreign fling that can whisk readers into another world. Also – can’t forget this – how deliciously scandalous!”<\/span><\/i>\u00a0–<\/span>Writer’s Digest<\/b><\/p>\n

Little did I know at the time that I had employed <\/span>the ancient Greek divination technique of<\/span>\u00a0Stikhomanteia<\/span><\/i>\u00a0(STEEK-ho-MAN-tee-uh), which involves using the written word to help clarify the future, whether through drawing slips of paper or opening a book to a random passage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One other benefit was the way learning about this helped shape another novel.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stikhomanteia<\/span><\/h2>\n

The practice of divination dates from prehistoric times, but the Greeks were into it, big time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There were two broad classes of practitioners:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n