Scrabble

I've been playing Scrabble a lot lately. And winning, despite my penchant for making interesting words (like "penchant") and ignoring the obvious "at" and "to" and "so," the words that can really rack up the big points in combination with other insignificant words. Perhaps this is because my Scrabble partner would also rather make interesting words, too. He's lying in wait, hoping to catch me off guard with something like "harquebus" (an ancient kind of gun).
In any case, when one of my students aked me how she would know WHEN to use all her little observations (scribbled on index cards at my suggestion), a Scrabble analogy came to mind. "Well, it's like playing Scrabble. You just see where the letters fit, and you decide where to place them to get the most points."
"But," she continued, "What if in the next move you could have used a tile you just put down, and gotten a jillion more points?" I didn't even need to think. "When you're writing, there are a jillion tiles. It's like a never-ending Scrabble game. There are always more ideas, and better ones."
And I think that's right. Why worry about running out of ideas when the world, in combination with our minds, always proffers more and more? I just wish it was that easy in a Scrabble game...