Pam's Puzzle Pieces of Plotting

Pull up a chair, and grab some of Ruthy’s to-die-for coffee or tea. What’s on the menu today, Ruthy? While we’re waiting for the rest of the spread, I’ll grab ten or so white mocha cappuccinos from Starbucks for the early risers.
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When I was a teenager, my daddy and I put a puzzle together every year. Shopping for a jigsaw puzzle was SO much fun. In the weeks before Christmas, Daddy and I searched for the perfect puzzle. We liked big puzzles, the bigger the better, 5000 pieces or more…that’s probably not big by today’s standards, but that size fit perfectly on our “puzzle” table. Once we found the right puzzle, we couldn’t wait to get started.
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Daddy and I loved pastoral scenes. Barns, horses, cattle, dogs, cats. And of course we had to have a big expanse of sky and a pond or lake because it’s hard to tell the lake pieces from the sky pieces, which is part of the fun.

Once we got home, we dumped the entire box out on the table and painstakingly turned all the pieces face up. While we were sorting, we could pick out a good many of the edges, and corner pieces, the frame of the picture.
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As we worked on the outline, we continued to sort all the little pieces, grouping them by color, and texture. I say texture because the solid green of a John Deere tractor is different to the green leaves of a tree. We would find all the sky and water pieces, and any pieces that were obvious…like the green of a tractor, or the fire-engine red of a 1964 Mustang.

We spent hours and hours searching for the right pieces, never hurrying, never forcing a piece. If a little piece of cardboard didn’t fit, we laid it aside and picked another. We studied the pieces we’d put together, then shuffled through the pieces left, looking for another piece to fit the hole. We worked on sections like the sky or the barn or the green tractor, and felt great satisfaction when we completed a whole section.
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And, finally, we put that last piece in and our puzzle was complete, a perfect replica of the picture on the box, but better because we put it all together ourselves.
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Wow!
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Isn’t this just like plotting out a brand new book?

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You come up with an idea – the picture on the box. You start plotting the outline, the frame of the story. Then you come up with little pieces, scenes, group them together and decide where they should fit in the story. And, piece by piece, your book starts to take shape before your eyes.

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But it takes time. You can’t force it. And if you’ve managed to somehow throw the pieces of three or four ideas (puzzles) into the pile, you’ll have to keep sorting until you weed out the ideas that don’t work for the story you’re working on.
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I’m far from an expert at plotting or piecing puzzles together, but I do know the more you work at either, the better you’ll be. Keep working, and you’ll learn to spot the right colors, the right textures, the right shapes, sizes, feelings, emotions, external conflicts, internal goals, and motivations to put your puzzle together.
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You can create a beautiful story, one piece at a time!

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And, now, for a little fun in the sun, here are some online beach puzzles that look like they were tailor-made for Seekerville! The beach scene above is one of the puzzles on the site.