The 10,000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

On my most recent novel writing adventures

I went to my recent writing residency with a simple goal, one that fits in a nice little package, a cute tweet, something tidy you could scrawl across a piece of paper and snap for an Instagram post: rewrite Act II by hand.

Goals are tricky, to say the least. Especially when it comes to writing. We live in a culture that loves goals and checking boxes and measuring productivity (capitalism!), but the creative process is pretty elusive and doesn’t always fit into neat, measurable packages. And yet sometimes setting a goal is exactly what we need to light a fire under our asses.

Let me tell you a secret about this goal I set: I was under no impression that I would achieve it. I set the goal and basically knew from the outset there was a snowball’s chance in hell.

But it did not make a goddamn difference, because it accomplished what I wanted it to: it gave me enough of a framework, a sightline to the horizon, to keep going. It gave me a container for imagining myself rising from a strange desk, setting down my pen, staring meaningfully out a window (as writers are always doing on TV, as if the way to write a book is stare out windows and thus have life-changing thoughts), and proclaiming in a soft but determined voice, “I did it. I rewrote Act II. Huzzah.” While I knew that scene would never occur, I needed to imagine it to know which way to point my pen.

TBH, I think achieving goals is kind of overrated, often a letdown after much hype and exertion. Think about a marathon (a thing I’ll never do but can imagine quite easily). You spend months training. You run it. You get a few hours to hopefully enjoy some of the run and then the rest of the day, weekend maybe, to feel into the elation of accomplishment. And then it’s kinda back to real life. The real juicy good stuff is in the process, is in loving those months of miles, watching the trees change, waving to the neighborhood dogs, getting obsessed with a certain album or podcast. Love the process and you are a winner every single time.

OK, OK, you probably want to know at least a little about how this Act II business went—how much did I write? How far did I get? Great questions all.

I wrote a lot at Weymouth, in tiny shards, in no particular order. One of my writing rules is if the sentence pops into my head, I have to write it down. Sometimes after I write that sentence, another comes out. I might get a paragraph, or a page. On a rare occasion one sentence will lead me to crank out three or four pages, a rough cut of a scene.

When I write these shards, I do not know what order they go in nor do I care. I just follow the tug of my subconscious. I listen and I scrawl.

For me writing a novel is akin to doing a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle in which you have to create each piece and do not have a box top that displays the completed design. When the sentences come out, it’s not always clear where they belong. For me it makes sense to write as many of the pieces as I can and trust that I will find a way to arrange them into a coherent image.

Post-residency, my notebook is littered with excerpts, sentences, half-scenes, frantic notes. As I review what I’ve written, I see I managed a few edge pieces, sturdy and anchoring. Most of the rest are those devilish middle pieces that are mostly one color with few discerning markings, that right now seem like they could fit a lot of different places. Oh well—I’ll need something to do on my next residency, right?

And yes, for those of you wondering, I do eventually type those notebook pages up. That transfer process is an important step, where the puzzle pieces get further shaped and defined. In this step, I see how much of a scene or section I’ve built and what’s missing, e.g. pacing of action and events, gesture and physicality, character motivation or backstory, dialogue with rhythm and tempo. If the scene is still quite fragmented and needs some more deep thinking, I go back to my notebook where I’m more successful noodling on those bigger items. Above all, it’s an iterative process.

The thing that’s silly about the goal I chose is that it implies linearity, i.e. “I will start at the beginning of Act II, write its scenes in order, until I come till the end.” But it’s a jigsaw puzzle—linearity is not a thing. Which is fine with me. I think associatively, and I write intuitively. I love a good jigsaw puzzle.

So how was my residency? Well, I wrote a lot of words, crossed out a bunch, and did not meet my stated goal. But I learned more about the story, more about that dastardly middle that can elude writers. And most importantly, I had a damn good time.