My Jigsaw Puzzle Approach to Writing
My Writing Journey Part 25
You know that slightly panicked feeling when someone tips a thousand jigsaw pieces onto a table and you realise — there's no box? No picture to refer to? Just a pile of pieces, a vague sense of what it might become, and the hope that it'll all make sense eventually?
That's often my writing process.
When I start a new story, I dump everything onto the table — fragments of scenes, snatches of dialogue, a character's description, a setting I can't stop thinking about, an emotional moment I know belongs somewhere. It looks like chaos, because honestly, sometimes it is. But buried in that pile are the pieces of a story worth telling.
I always assumed I'd be a chronological writer. Turns out, I'm not. Each book has taught me something different about how I work — and I've learned to follow the story wherever it leads, even if that means skipping ahead. I've written a proposal scene before my characters have shared their first kiss. And you know what? Sometimes that's exactly where the story needs me to be.
Because here's the thing — if a scene arrives fully formed, I'm not going to wait for permission to write it. If I hold off until I've written everything that comes before, I risk losing it entirely. So, I write it, leave a gap, and trust that the in-between pieces will show up eventually.
Then comes the sorting. And finally, two pieces that fit — a throwaway line that connects to the ending, a backstory detail that reframes everything. There's nothing quite like that little snap of pieces locking into place.
But then there are the gaps. The maddening missing pieces I can't quite find. Sometimes I've been staring at the puzzle from the wrong angle entirely — a quick shuffle, a scene moved from the middle to the beginning, and suddenly everything shifts.
And occasionally a piece I was certain belonged to this story turns out to belong to another one altogether. I set it aside, a little reluctantly, and keep going.
Somehow, eventually, it all comes together. Not necessarily the picture I imagined at the start — but something better. Something that could only have been built exactly this way, piece by piece, by me.