Assemble Your Story Like a Jigsaw Puzzle

The latest craze in my household has been jigsaw puzzles. There’s something so soothing and yet stimulating, something wonderfully old-fashioned and analog, about working slowly and steadily on a puzzle. I think of it as assembling my own little sand mandala, putting care and effort into it. At the end, I have to acknowledge that it is transitory, and I get almost as much pleasure as crumpling it up again. But as writers do, I’ve been relating the experience back to my writing, and thinking about what it can teach us all about writing. I think I’ve boiled it down to a few key lessons.

1. Start on the outside and work your way in

Everyone knows that the way to begin a puzzle is to look for edges. It’s one clear frame of reference you can work on, somewhere to get started. At the beginning of a large writing project, we can often feel intimidated by the vast emptiness looming in front of us. So much is just a big dark blur in our minds, undefined. It’s kind of like the feeling of dumping that massive pile of puzzle pieces on the table and realizing just how many of them are ocean or sky. How can we possibly assemble something as large and complex as this?


2. Match like with like


3. Look for a continuing thread

The next problem jigsaw puzzlers encounter is how these regions fit together. That’s why we puzzlers love finding pieces with a continuing thread, some sort of stripe or color that bridges the two zones. We live for those half-and-half type pieces. In the same way, we’ve got to find half-and-half moments in our writing. If the chapters are completely distinct, we might as well make them short stories; if the scenes of a short story are so distinct, then they simply won’t fit together. Once you’ve gotten a sense of the “zones” of your story, start working to piece them together. Plant a seed in one chapter that will blossom in another; start a fight in one chapter that won’t be resolved until the next. These connecting threads are what make the puzzle — and the story — come together as one beautiful work.

Hope this metaphor served you well, readers — now it’s back to puzzling (and writing) for me.


  1. The key decisions, for me, are the context of the story — where and when it takes place, whose story is it, and the beginning and the end. Once I have those, I can begin filling in the details of the plot: the inciting incident, major plot points.

    I’m not a detailed plotter by nature, and I can (and have) get some of this wrong, forcing me to go back and rewrite, but that’s usually where I start. I need who, where, and the beginning at a minimum in order to pick up my pen, erm, mouse, and write.

  2. To write, I need an emotion. Sometimes it is a bit of a jigsaw when I feel several emotions hit me at once and most times it is difficult to sort them out. I usually feel like I am at the edge and ready to work my way inward if I feel like I must write about something, but more often than not I am just starting the journey and have no idea how to proceed. I have years and years and years of writing to look back upon, but nothing ever as concrete as the front of the box of a jigsaw puzzle in which to find the end of the puzzlement. Now wouldn’t that be nice if it could be wrapped up so neatly?


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