My family has a tradition of putting together puzzles during the holidays. The wobbly card table comes up from the basement. The furniture’s shuffled around. And in the quiet times between visiting relatives or Christmas shopping, we’ll sneak a cookie and saunter up to the table, idly trying to find a match or two before having to run off somewhere else.

Amazingly, slowly, fantastic pictures of wizards or the vague dots of George Seurat take shape on that table. Until somewhere around New Years, the final piece goes in. A work of art assembled out of cardboard.

Putting together a story is pretty similar. You get all your pieces out there and start moving them around, separating by patterns and colors. In the middle of everything else… doing the dishes, walking the dog, brushing your teeth…you saunter up sideways to whatever muddled ideas are floating around. And pretending like it’s no big deal, you turn them this was and that until, snap, something fits together.

This summer, I got in the holiday mood and bought a card table and a puzzle. I studiously put the border together and then promptly got distracted. And there the puzzle sat, in the middle of the living room for months and months. With dogs bumping the table legs and people putting their bags on it, and general chaos swirling around.

Until… I started revising again. I got some feedback on my novel that was insightful, completely true, and not a little overwhelming. Turns out, my story was close, but it still had holes in it. So, in the middle of trying to figure out how to fix my story, I wandered back to my puzzle.

It was a perfect activity to do while I was thinking about my book. The problem was that the puzzle, like my story, had been sitting there for months with life happening all around it. I was positive that I’d lost a piece of it by now.

And I had.

But what happened with the puzzle was amazingly close to what was happening in my writing life. As I put the puzzle together, lost pieces found their way back to me. A friend, who’d been at my house weeks before, mysteriously found a piece at the bottom of his bag. My husband found another on the floor right before the vacuum ate it.

When the puzzle was about 90% complete, I began to suspect that there was still one piece missing. Friends would look over my shoulder and ask “Where’s that piece?” Because they could see as clearly as I could that there were no more orange pieces left on the table.

“Um…maybe it’s there somewhere,” I’d say, waving vaguely at my ever dwindling pile of pieces.

I kept putting the picture together around it, stomach sinking. Hoping that by sheer force of will the piece would magically appear. Until finally, all the pieces were gone and there was still one gaping hole in the puzzle.

I looked around the table. I scoured the floor. I glared at my dog, who’d probably eaten it. Then in a fit of desperation… I looked in the box. And there, in the corner, was one lone puzzle piece. A smudge of orange that’d never been out on the table in the first place. Something that had been waiting all this time to complete the picture. Snap. It fit into place and there in front of me, with reds and yellows and all the oranges, was a phoenix rising up into the air.

Posted in Revision, Writing

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