THE PUZZLE AND THE PICTURE

           

                                 BRINGING YOUR IDEAS TOGETHER

How many of you love to work puzzles? This includes but not limited to anagrams, ciphers, crossword, word search, and jigsaw puzzles. Personally, I love them all but my choice would be jigsaw puzzles. Because to me, it’s like visual art. I’ll dump it all out on a table, search for all the corner pieces before I began fitting the other parts together.

It always amazes me as I start to assemble the different shapes how they all join right where they are supposed to. Before you know it, you have a perfect picture of what was once just a confusing assortment of colorful cardboard.

I love puzzles with hundreds of parts because I like being challenged. Landscapes or replicas of art masterpieces are my absolute favorites.

Storytelling is a lot like puzzles. Sometimes it’s like a jumbo edition in your mind, but the good thing is you’ve already seen the completed picture. Yet in reality, it’s still a million bits and pieces of information that you need to string together on paper.

 There is a process to everything we do this includes writing. From concept to completion, there are simple and complex steps that take our story from idea to reality.

Whenever I began a project, my mind is already formulating how I want to layout the story. I develop characters, assign them names, and then place them in precarious situations but In an orderly fashion within the story.

Sounds super simple right, well this is not always the case.

Sometimes my thoughts are not always in story order, but because I’ve seen the entire picture before it was cut up in sections, I still know exactly where it needs to go in the story.

I’m a scribbler, so there are always pieces of paper or my handy dandy notebook (given to me by a dear friend) to notate my thoughts. There are few moments when I’m not in a mood to write. My mind is always in progress, especially if I’m working on a project.

Since this is typically my modus operandi, I always carry paper and pen with me, wherever I go. Simply because I never know when an idea may present itself to me.

How do I get anything else done, if I’m always sleeping, eating, breathing, anything that has to do with writing, you might ask? Well the short answer is, I’m a multi-tasker. I basically work around my compulsion to write. Some might argue that this is an unhealthy disorder, and I have to disagree.

Yes, I am compelled to write by some force that is much bigger than me. However, it is also part of my DNA, something that was placed inside my genetic makeup before I was ever created.

It is that desire to be creative. Yet much like most things, it is controllable, and allows me to live a somewhat normal life.

Now, let’s get back to the puzzle. So far, we’ve laid out all the corner pieces, that I like to call boarders, because this is what bridges the story together. These guides give you a starting point to help construct the rest of the story from beginning to end.

One by one, we test ideas moving them around until we find the right placement. If it doesn’t fit at the beginning of the story then we move it around until it clicks into place.

Often, I’ll take a break, just so I can see the progress. This has proven to be quite helpful in the creative process, because it allows me to see what I need to do next.

It doesn’t matter if I’ve only completed about a fourth of the project. The important thing is I can see what my next move should be and the direction I need to take.

I’ll move from the top to the middle, trying out different pieces of the puzzle. Because sometimes honestly. I’m stumped and don’t know what I need to do to get back on the right track. Order is good, but there are exceptions to every rule. I find it helpful when my creative juices are drying up a little, and to start them flowing again, I’ll move to another section, maybe toward the end.

I know, you can’t write an ending without finishing the beginning and the middle, but I can use the same concept like as I did for the corners, to throw around ideas while I’m deciding how to make the other pieces of the puzzle fit.

Lord forbid if I should lose any parts of the puzzle, if this happens I’ll have a story with no hope of completion.

Be that as it may, I’ve gone too far to start over at this point, but I can’t move forward either.

 In most cases, it only means something is not in the right place, just because it fit in one area, doesn’t mean that’s where it belongs. So instead of disassembling a perfect story, backtrack and see where you went wrong.

One clue is you have an eye where the nose should be.

In the case of writing, you’ve left a important detail about one of the characters. In either case it is fixable.

Now would be a good time to push back and look at what you have so far. This will allow you to find the misplaced section. You know it belongs in the story but you’re just not sure where it goes.

Okay once, you’ve discovered your error, you now have the task of seeing what other pieces are in the wrong place as well. Hopefully, you won’t have to move to many other parts around, and should be easily detectable because in most cases you’ll find the missing nose section. 

 So, now that every part is where it belongs, you sit back and enjoy just staring at the fruit of your labor. Sounds a lot like childbirth doesn’t it? For me, it is a bit, because I began something I hope to see to completion.

The puzzle and the picture are partners in every writing project. The idea is to unscramble your ideas, match the interlocking pieces, and continue placing them until the story is cohesive, accurate and revealed in it’s entirety. 

Now that you’ve brought every piece of something that was a huge conundrum together, you’re ready to place it on display, and show the world, what was once a puzzle, is now a perfect picture.