Grasping Straws?

When you’re stuck, reaching for a random card feels like grasping straws. But the drowning man’s error isn’t grabbing — it’s assuming everything within reach is a straw. Sometimes you close your hand around a diamond. The question mark is the whole method: you won’t know which you drew until you use it.

What this is

Grasping Straws is an original deck of lateral-thinking prompts for breaking creative deadlocks — in music, film, writing, or anything else. Each card is an instruction, a question, or a koan. Draw one, take it seriously for ten minutes, and see where it puts your attention.

Lineage

The deck is inspired by Oblique Strategies, the card deck Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt first published in 1975. The debt is to the form, not the words: every card here is original.

Why the physical deck

This site deals cards with algorithmic randomness — a formula pretending to be chance. A paper deck shuffled by your own hands is the real thing: true randomness, and the small ritual of cutting the deck and turning a card over. The screen version is a sample; the object is the instrument.

The physical deck is coming soon: fifty-two prompts, a title card and an instructions card, tarot-size, printed to order. The day it exists, every link to it on this site points there.

Until then there is a free print-and-play edition — the whole deck and the five rules cards, four to a page with cut lines. Paper you cut yourself is still paper.

Deck v1 · Today's card ·Ways to play · The deck · Made by Lorenzo.