Writing As Process: What We Can Learn from Puzzles

Last year, at the beach house my extended family was renting for a week, someone found a one-thousand-piece puzzle. The image on the box depicted a bucolic evening scene over a body of water, birds flying up and over rushes and trees. The image was painted in shades of purple and blue, brown and green. The effect was impressionist watercolor, all hazy shapes and blurred edges.

The puzzle pieces, once we spilled them out across the table, looked absolutely interchangeable. Nevertheless, we set out to complete the easiest task first (the edges) and take it from there.

A rotating cast of about five of us, three the most dedicated (you might say obstinate), worked on this puzzle over a period of several days. Everyone else took a look at those indistinguishable pieces, shook their heads in a mixture of respect and fear for their sanity, and walked away. We staked out dibs on certain color schematics. Slowly, with much grinding and gnashing of teeth, the puzzle began to fill out.

And as it did so, we began to spot connections we hadn’t seen before. We experienced Puzzle Magic.

Puzzle Lesson #1: Beginnings can be slow

The hardest part of a puzzle is to find the first two pieces that fit together. The hardest part of writing any book is just starting.

When we write, we create something from nothing. We literally begin with a blank page (screen).

How quickly we begin to fill in that blank space does a lot not only for the shape of our book, but for our comfort and confidence and ease of mind. Which is why I’m a tremendous advocate of getting something, nearly anything, down on paper to kick things off. Words, even the wrong ones, give you something to work with.

I’m in the habit of collecting writing quotes. One that I shared last month, from Jodi Picoult, reads: “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”

Beginnings can be slow. You’ll find yourself looking at individual pieces, sometimes a lot, and thinking, “There is no way a full book is going to come out of this.”

Puzzle Lesson #2: Decide on a starter strategy

In the beginning, you may have no idea whether any two pieces are going to fit together, so you need some basic way to create order from chaos, even if you don’t stick with that strategy forever.

In the case of our puzzle, we employed two classic strategies: (1) we started with the edges; and (2) each of us focused on a distinct color scheme.

You can do this with your book, too. Some pieces obviously suggest themselves as beginnings or endings. Some scenes or passages are more clear than others. Once you have enough of these pieces, you’ll start to notice common themes, as well as differences, and you can batch and work on them together.

Start with whatever is easiest, to begin with. You just need to put two pieces together at first, then two more.

Puzzle Lesson #3: Natural connections begin to form

The fun part of puzzling is when seemingly unrelated chunks start to fit together. It’s like filling in the outline of a line sketch. Every subsequent piece gets easier, both because you see more of the context, and because there are fewer pieces left to find homes for. I call this Puzzle Magic.

One of my clients is at this stage in the drafting process as I write this post. In the beginning, there was a lot of back and forth with the outline and with the draft. Small nuggets of stories seemed to float, homeless, amidst other bullet points. And now, what was once an outline has become a draft, and they’ve begun to write transitions and connections into the material.

All of the content they’ve been collecting has started to form a bigger picture.

They’re picking up a head of steam.

Magic. …Or is it?

Bottom Line

Writing is a process. The start of any new project is its own animal, no matter how many projects you’ve completed before. This is good news for both experienced and beginning writers. Experienced writers know what emerging on the other side is like. Beginning writers are not going through any special junkyard reserved especially for them.

Obstinacy in the face of other people’s reactions may be in order. Not everyone will get what you are trying to do, but some will. They’ll be right there with you, asking if you have any blue pieces with a brown edge. You can always walk away and join the folks at the other table having a cup of tea, but you won’t finish your puzzle that way.

You may need to defend your work from wanton, if ignorant, destruction. What happened with our gorgeous evening scene, you wonder? My three-and-a-half-year old godson happened to it. He was conducting his own experiment (“What happens if I do this?”). We didn’t have enough time in our stay to rebuild. Your Destroyers might be interruptions, distractions, and perhaps leaving your story alone for too long.

Have you assembled your pieces? Let’s have fun building something out of this mess!

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Want some company as you sort through that first pile of ideas? Let’s talk about coaching.

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CC image “Puzzle” courtesy of Kevin Dooley on Flickr. Some rights reserved.