Lateral Thinking Puzzles and Interrogating Your Story
Stress-testing your stories with Albatross Soup
Lateral Thinking Puzzles make me cry1.
I can’t explain it. I discovered this unfortunate physical reaction in my college days, which is also when I first discovered Lateral Thinking Puzzles (sometimes called Situation Puzzles). If you’re unfamiliar, these are logic puzzles where you’re given an initial and usually quite mysterious scenario. You must then figure out what’s really going on by asking a series of yes/no questions.
Here’s a famous one (and, in fact, the first one I ever encountered): A man walks into a restaurant, sits down, and orders Albatross Soup. When the bowl arrives, he takes on spoonful, tastes it, then stands up, walks outside, and shoots himself in the head. Why?
NOTE: This is one of the most famous LTPs around, so I am going to spoil it somewhat later in this essay. If you want to work through it fresh (not a bad idea!) go and do so and then come back to this.
The answer’s out there on the Internet if you want it, but of course there’s no fun in that2. The fun is piecing together the larger story by asking simple questions. Had the man ever had Albatross Soup before? No! Does the type of soup matter? Yes! Does the specific restaurant he chose matter? No! That sort of thing. It’s easy to be led down lengthy, incorrect paths when you think you’ve gotten an interesting response. It’s easy to get trapped in your own assumptions—you can easily neglect to ask a key questions because you assume you know the answer.
My friends and I discovered these and used them like a parlor game, drinking beers and taking turns running a question3. And the really good ones are creepy as fuck, or at least seem to be until you solve them. Even the puzzles that aren’t creepy seem creepy for a goodly portion of your time with them, because you wind up asking questions like “Does he have a terminal illness?” or “Is he a terrifying Old One who drives men insane the moment they look upon him?”4 You can never actually know whether the story is sci-fi or horror or a mundane situation dressed up in mystery, and that’s part of the fun.
So, every time I tried my hand at these puzzles I’d start to weep. It was just a weird psychological reaction I honestly can’t explain; we’d start a puzzle and I’d just start to cry. Like, ugly cry. My friends mocked me for a while, but then just came to accept it5. It never happened with anything else—not horror movies, not sad stories, not video games or other entertainments. Just Lateral Thinking Puzzles and their weird, Black Mirror vibe.
But I’ll tell you this: Lateral Thinking Puzzles can totally improve your writing.
Questions are a Burden
Lateral Thinking Puzzles are, essentially, stories told in the most inefficient and burdensome way possible6. The moderator or whatever you want to call the person who knows the secret can only respond to yes/no questions, leaving it up to the puzzlers to figure everything out7. In a sense, they’re building a world, fleshing out a character and their motivations, and assembling plot twists one question at a time.
What this means, though, is that by the time you arrive at the answer, that is one well-built story. You have kicked the tires. You have interrogated assumptions. You have discovered far more about the story and the universe it inhabits than you need—the Albatross Soup puzzle, for example, could probably be solved in just a few questions if you happen to hit on the right sequence early on. But the longer it takes you, the more information you get, and the fuller the picture becomes.
This also means that any Lateral Thinking Puzzle has to be very solid. Obvious, trite ideas get solved too quickly. Weird, convoluted ones that don’t adhere to a logical pattern take too long and are never satisfying. Any story worth reading should be able to pass this test, should be able to endure a long list of yes/no questions that slowly reveal its structure, its pacing, its characters and themes. If you could put your story into a very dark room and force people to figure it out just via binary investigation, you’d know that it stands up, that you’ve created something worthy.
This is also a great way to stress-test plot twists. If your goal is to surprise but not frustrate your readers, approaching your plot twists like LTPs can show you whether they work or not.
Most importantly, Lateral Thinking Puzzles teach you to view your stories from unexpected angles, because working through a LTP will result in the story changing in your audience’s head several times. It starts off impenetrable, and then becomes variously a murder mystery, a supernatural horror story, a mundane dystopian tale, and then, finally, its true self.
For example, let’s take a closer look at Albatross Soup.
The set up is pretty bare bones, but one of the first questions people ask is usually Is it important what kind of soup it is? The answer is yes. This is often followed by Has the man had Albatross Soup before? which leads to a dilemma for the moderator. It’s usually considered okay for the moderator to answer “irrelevant” to a question that has zero impact on the solution, but these dilemmas are still pretty common because the yes/no requirement doesn’t allow for any sort of ambivalence; eventually my friends and I began allowing the moderator to say “I can’t answer that” to solve for this8. Without that option, they might dodge by asking that you re-phrase the question, or make an executive decision about how to answer—but right there you’re already thinking critically about the story. When I played my way through this one it was frustrating until someone asked Does it matter where he had the soup before, and then things broke open.
You get lost down rabbit holes, of course. The moderator hesitates to say yes or no and you think aha! I’ve hit on something! when in fact you’ve just hit on a momentary lapse of confidence, and you spend 30 minutes chasing down bullshit9. Slowly, you collect facts. You build the world, one question at a time. Was he alone when he ate the soup? No. Did the soup in the restaurant taste like he expected? No. Did he kill himself because of the way the soup tasted? Oh, yes10.
Now you have the specific why, but this teaches you that the mechanics of why aren’t what makes a story. You need everything else—the why behind the why. Did he eat the soup in another restaurant? No. Did he make the soup himself? No. Did someone make it for him. Yes!
Was there something other than albatross in the soup?
These puzzles can demonstrate how details make the story. Withhold a detail, you have a drama. Contribute a new detail, you have a horror story. Add more, you have a thriller. When you have all the details and your reader has none, you can literally do anything you want.
Of course, having tears stream down your face every time you work on a puzzle isn’t ideal, though I tell myself this just proves I’m very special, just like my Mom always said.
Next time: The Queen’s Gambit and not showing your work.
Every time I think this writing career has stolen all of my dignity, I find a fresh vein to mine.
As we’re all slowly learning, there’s no fun in the Internet at all. It’s all porn and angry Qanon rants, all the way down.
I am slowly starting to wonder if my friends and I were as cool as I remember.
We started asking “IS HE DEAD?” after one marathon puzzle took us like a week to solve because no one thought to inquire after the main character’s zombie status.
That’s pretty much my relationship with my old school friends in a nutshell: Mockery, followed by acceptance. That, my friends, is platonic love.
In other words: The Somers Way.
In addition to “irrelevant,” some folks allow for a third option, “Yope,” which means not quite yes, not quite no.
This is obviously better than yope, which I am starting to think Wikipedia made up.
This is sort of similar to how we all spent years of our lives discussing Lost or Game of Thrones, desperately trying to construct some brilliant twist that would make those stories well worth all the time we put into them. Sometimes you start to suspect a story is going in a very boring and obvious direction and you imagine you can steer around the iceberg through sheer force of will.
As an impoverished bachelor I cobbled together several sad meals from unconventional ingredients that made me want to kill myself after one bite, so I can relate.
The Albatross Soup—Lateral Thinking Puzzle—sounds like a helpful tool that will be fun to work with, thanks. 👍