Confidence Game

Michelle M. Welch on Confidence Game

Confidence Game is the result of a project that began seventeen years ago when a high school friend gave me a notebook full of background writing for a book she never completed, and told me, "Finish my book." After two attempts to rewrite it in high school and one in college, I had a world that borrowed from her original countries; an intricate network of history, religion, government, and social structures; six hundred years of backplot; and no story. The project languished at the bottom of my closet.

Some time later, while watching too much television, I had an idea. A brief obsession with spy movies left me with a question that was rarely answered: how did the spies get to be who they were? I created a character and turned her loose in my head to figure it out. Contributing to this project were two TV news programs: one on con artists and one on Romanian orphans with reactive attachment disorder. This material was proof that sometimes inspiration consists of melding together wildly unrelated things—and Elzith Kar was born. I recovered my world from the bottom of the closet and sent her to live in it. Now I had a voice in which I could express the ideas I was interested in: what makes Elzith a good spy, and what is the cost to her. Now I had a story. It’s not the same book that my high school friend told me to finish, but I hope it’s a good one nonetheless.