Puzzling It All Out

To me, writing is like putting a puzzle together. You have to understand that in my house my siblings have dumped all the puzzles in the same box, so all the pieces are all mixed together in one big hodge-podge. The potential in that box is endless, but the task of getting anything recognizable out of it is daunting.

I have to find some quiet time and some open table space and set a lamp on the table and cut the rest of the lights. I have to look for a few moments through the random pieces, trying to find one that fits the kind of paper I want. Once I get the first few ideas to fit I can get an outline of what I’m going to write. The edge pieces. I can get an idea of the magnitude and basic themes I’m going to use. Then I commence dredging through my experience, recalling things I’ve read or thought, sifting out most of the extraneous ideas because they’re just off-topic or they’re too simplistic and belong in a much simpler puzzle. Once I get the collection of likely ideas, I have to try and fit them together within the framework I’ve created. Sometimes I find ideas that fit well together and form cohesive points and arguments, but some of those will have to be discarded because they just don’t go to this paper at all, good though they were. Sometimes I find an idea that seems to fit really well, because it’s cut almost the same as the one that will belong there, and yet it just doesn’t work. That’s the most frustrating thing in the world.

Sometimes I just hit the wall. Ideas stop flowing. The behemoth grinds to a halt. That’s when it’s time to take a break; walk around and get something to eat; play some games. Then I have to go back to work on my puzzle masterwork. It’s amazing what an hour of mindlessly bashing animated foes into imagined oblivion will do for the creative juices. New ideas flow in places they hadn’t been coming from before. It’s like finding a stash of pieces under the couch.

With all the pieces that have been lost over the years I don’t think that it’s actually possible to complete a puzzle in its entirety in my house. But you can get pretty close. Sometimes you have to actually throw a chunk of it out because while those trees seemed to fit really well in the landscape, they don’t belong in this puzzle. Or sometimes I just have to get inventive and make two puzzles fit together to make a nice picture that no one ever really painted. That’s an amazing feeling.