Suddenly, her phone rang. “Why are you sending me this?” Varotto asked. Altrov Berg explained what was happening. Varotto was confused. She hadn’t sent any emails to Norstedts all day.
With Varotto on the phone, the two Norstedts employees scrolled through the messages. The emails looked like ones Varotto would send: The text used the same font, and the signature at the end was styled just like hers. Then, with Varotto still on the line, Mörk got yet another email asking for the password.
Wingspan is what’s known among serious gamers as an “engine-building game,” which means that as the game goes on, the combination of birds you play becomes more and more efficient at generating points each turn, like an engine running faster and faster. Your cuckoo lays eggs, and the eggs not only give you points but make it possible to play more birds, which also give you more points but have their own powers that generate points in other ways. I prefer thinking about the mechanism of Wingspan not as an engine I am building, but as an ecosystem I am fostering. If I’ve strategized well, the birds in my ecosystem will be knitted together into a web of complex, mutually beneficial relationships. Activating the cascading effects of these healthy interconnections is the greatest pleasure of playing Wingspan.
It’s those interconnections that Hargrave began mapping out in a ginormous spreadsheet once she decided she really did want to design a board game. For four years, she researched birds, brainstormed play ideas, and—most crucially—tested the game, over and over, every week for years, with a group of friends who helped her refine her vague idea for a game about birds into an experience that’s engrossing, contemplative, collaborative, and even beautiful.
“Once I began living truthfully I felt like I could breathe again. I no longer have to lie or hide,” King writes. “I can be my authentic self, and I can say this with pride: It’s been a lovely, sometimes lonely, often soul-shaking, ultimately gratifying ride. It’s been full of sparks and recrimination. But I came through it.
“I am free.”
John McPhee has said that the lead of an article serves as a searchlight that shines down into the body of a piece—which is a good enough description for a work of nonfiction, where story is already formed, has already happened, and needs only to be reported—but the first sentence of a piece of fiction serves as much more than searchlight or hook or even lure to the reluctant reader. The first sentence in a work of fiction places the first limitation on the utterly limitless world of the author’s imagination. Before that first sentence is composed, anything is possible. The fiction writer is free to write about anything at all—we are, after all, just making this stuff up—in any voice at all: a child’s, a dog’s, a dead man’s, a god in his heaven, even in the voice of the author herself.
The blank page is nothing less than the wondrous realm of infinite possibilities, and the first words we place on it are nothing less than, well, a sentence, the prison kind, a confinement of all that roving, beautiful, undefined promise into a particular story bound by time and place (four prison walls and a floor and ceiling) and voice (of the prisoner, of the other inmates) and rules (our jailor), narrative rules and grammatical rules, rules of logic and composition, experience and sense, rules that we must attend to even if—most particularly if—we set out to break them.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yawn. That cloying love poem, “How do I love thee?” That portrait where she looks at us sideways, her heavy curls shadowing her face. A Victorian invalid who was the victim of her father’s tyranny. What, really, does she have to do with us today?
Not much, one might think, until one reads poet Fiona Sampson’s brilliant, heart-stopping biography, “Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” which reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time.