The Riddle Game

What is the question that's hidden in rhymes

Sometimes brand new, or from ancient times

The answer that's simple, but so hard to see

This is my essence. Can you define me?

(The above is a completely original riddle written by me.)

It's a riddle! Well, you might be thinking, do you mean the answer is a riddle or the poem itself is a riddle, or...forget it. Those of you who participated in my Mission: Mansion contest on my other blog will already have experience with my riddles. Believe it or not, riddles are actually fairly easy to write once you get the hang of them, and the above took me about two minutes to write. By now, you're probably wondering what my secret is. I'm ready to tell you now. Whenever you need that little riddle for a gate password, a test of intelligence, or just a mystical inscription, this is your handy little two-minute riddle-writing guide to refer back to. 

Here are the 5 steps to riddle making!

1. Decide what you want the answer to be. I'd recommend something relatively simple, but it has to be at least somewhat interesting to make your task easier. For example: "pencil" or "shoelace" would be bad answers to a riddle.

2. Write down (or just think of) different meanings/interpretations/aspects of the answer. Take the riddle above. I'd write rhymes, simple, ancient, question, etc. Think of as many as you can without going overboard. If you don't use all of them in the final product, that's okay. While doing this, consider the difficulty of your riddle. Choose more obscure words/phrases for harder difficulty. For example: the riddle above was designed to be guessed immediately, while many of the riddles from my contest were written to be challenging.

3. Play with your notes from step 2. Arrange them into sentences. Decide which order to put them in. Think about how you could express them poetically. Decide how you could phrase them so that they rhyme. 

4. Construct the poem. Insert your ideas, likely altering a few of them to fit, or maybe adding something last-minute if you discover you need to. This is absolutely okay, and I often do this. 

5. Make edits if you need to, rewrite it from start to finish if need be. You may not even need to do this step. Congratulations! You now have a complete riddle. 

Don't be disappointed if you can't write riddles in two minutes at first. These take practice. The steps above are designed as a starting point, and lately I've been able to decide on a solution and difficulty and write the riddle from start to finish. With enough practice, you should be able to do this eventually, too. Good luck! 

What captures the mind, ensnares it a trap?

What acts as a guide or a path or a map?

What takes you on journeys in magical lands?

What is all these things, given the correct hands?

~ Sophia-Rose