Re-puzzling
For the past couple of days, I’ve been slowly shifting away from my discussion of Scott and casting about for some other things to read, watch, and/or think about. I haven’t really found my next rabbit hole, but at the same time, I found myself thinking about jigsaw puzzles, for a few different reasons.
I’ve been trying (finally) to thin out the clutter in my living space which, if I’m honest, I haven’t really done since the pandemic. So I’ve been boxing up books I’m not likely to read again anytime soon and trying to be a little more mercenary about all of my stuff. One of the things that I did was to re-home a few of my jigsaw puzzles—I only ever do them once, but at the same time, I don’t want to throw them away, so it was nice to find someone else who was interested in taking them off my hands. When I talk to people about puzzles (which is rare), I often recommend the movie Puzzle (2018).
Puzzle is a quiet movie, full of small gestures. It’s not particularly unpredictable, but there’s something about it that clicks for me. Kelly McDonald (left above) plays a suburban housewife (Agnes) and mother of two college-aged, teenage boys whose time is split between taking care of her family, volunteering at church, and occasionally helping with the books down at her husband’s autoshop. Her life is sheltered and insular. For her birthday (the movie opens at her party), someone gives her a jigsaw puzzle. On a whim, while she’s alone one afternoon, she opens it and completes it, quickly.
She enjoys it enough that she finds out where her friend bought it, and ends up going to NYC to visit a puzzle shop to buy another. While she’s there, she sees a flier looking for a “puzzle partner,” which she answers. She ends up meeting Robert (played by Irrfan Khan, above right), and unbeknownst to her family, she starts visiting the city twice a week to train with him for an upcoming puzzle tournament. Much of the movie deals with the tension between this secret passion of hers and the heretofore traditional housewife role she’d come to accept.
I’ll leave the rest of it to your own interest, but there’s one point in the movie where Agnes sort of steps back and wonders out loud why she’s complicated her life for what is in essence a “childish” pastime. And Robert answers,
There’s nothing we can do to control anything. But when you complete a puzzle, and you finish it, you know you have made all the right choices, no matter how many wrong pieces you tried to fit into the wrong places. But at the very end, everything makes a perfect picture. What other pursuits can give you that kind of perfection?
I was thinking about that this week when a colleague of mine posted about her writing process on Facebook, likening it to puzzle-making. She wrote about how, rather than “fixating” on individual pieces and trying to fit everything else around them, it made more sense to start with a frame and then start filling it in “as you see things fitting it together.”
I thought this was a nice metaphor for capturing some of the things that I tend to do almost tacitly in my own writing. I’ve been slowly reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, a book that I don’t expect to complete any time soon, given how long it is and how little I know about neuroscience. But it’s got loads of information about how the hemispheres of our brains differ, and I was struck by McGilchrist’s discussion of attention:
The right hemisphere underwrites breadth and flexibility of attention, where the left hemisphere brings to bear focussed attention. This has the related consequence that the right hemisphere sees things whole, and in their context, where the left hemisphere sees things abstracted from context, and broken into parts, from which it then reconstructs a ‘whole’: something very different.
This sounds very familiar to me, particularly when it comes to the way that I use this space. I tend to flicker between these “brands” of attention: some posts (like this one) just collect together a few different pieces whose connection is usually pretty loose, while every once in a while, I’ll do a deep dive on a particular text or idea.
But I’d argue that there’s a broader lesson for writers in general, one that’s connected both to that puzzle metaphor and to those of us who go to graduate school in the humanities. Most of us in the latter case have really polished abilities when it comes to attentional focus—generally speaking, we’re good at picking up an article or a book, understanding how it’s put together, and capable of the kind of left-brain analysis that McGilchrist suggests. As I’ve written elsewhere, I sometimes believe that the way we teach, read, and write in graduate school focuses too much on this kind of left-brain brand of attention. That’s why I often tell students (who are moving into the later stages of their doctoral study) that they need to develop strategies for project management. They need to be able to make progress on projects (like dissertations) without being able to hold it all in their head at once (the way we often do for seminar papers).
Here’s one example. Once I’d figured out the rough sketch of what my dissertation would look like, as I was reading, I would put notes in the margins of books and essays based on the chapter that I saw a particular idea or quotation fitting into. My books from that time are absolutely littered with “intro,” “ch2,” “ch4?” and similar markings. In a lot of ways, this was basically the note card system I wrote about a few months ago, only I left the “cards” in the books themselves (and had all of the books handy in my grad school apartment). But the reason I was able to do that was because I’d already spent the time necessary to establish the “whole,” the larger blueprint for the project into which all of those pieces could fit. So I wasn’t reading a passage in a book, and thinking about whether or not I could build it out into something bigger; instead, I had the big picture locked down, and could read alert to possible resources. That sort of alertness (or vigilance) is characteristic of right-brain attention, according to McGilchrist. The right hemisphere is also more capable of altering that big picture when we come across information that challenges it: “the right hemisphere presents an array of possible solutions, which remain live while alternatives are explored.”
Thinking about the puzzle metaphor in light of this, I feel like it probably needs adjusting, because an actual jigsaw has a single image, a specific shape, and a set number of pieces. Writing itself is a little more complicated. You don’t have a set number of pieces, any more than X number of note cards will necessarily add up to a chapter. The shape of it may change (I was thinking about the shapes of books recently via Austin Kleon’s piece on edge-indexing), as may the image itself that you’re building as you assemble it. In some ways, I wonder if Legos might be a better metaphor than the jigsaw.
The more expensive Lego sets are not unlike jigsaw puzzles themselves, but I have in mind something more like the image above, the big jumble of pieces out of which we might construct anything.
Maybe the signal difference for me between thinking about writing as either jigsaw pieces or Legos goes back to that line from Puzzle. When I first heard it and thought about it, I concluded that that was one of the things that I enjoyed most about writing, that moment when it all fits together and “at the very end, everything makes a perfect picture.” But you know what? It doesn’t, not really, if I’m being honest.
I remember when I got the first physical copy of my book (15 years ago!). In the hardcover copy, the title on the cover is different from that on the title page (one says “toward,” the other “towards” lol). There are a bunch of typos that I missed even after having gone through it multiple times. And that’s to say nothing of the scholarship that I only discovered after the fact that I should have incorporated into it. A perfect picture it was not. At the same time, though, it was, for me.
There are always missing pieces, other things that we could do with the things we’ve written if only we’d given ourselves a little more time. As carefully as I try to craft my posts here, I nearly always find mistakes, missing words, or sentences that I should have shaped a bit more consciously. And then there’s the fact that out thinking evolves over time, in spurts and jumps, such that the “right choices” we might make in a piece of writing might more accurately be described as “right now choices.” When I wrote last year about how I approached poetry as puzzles when I was an English major in college, I wrote a line that jumped back out at me this time around: “while we can treat poems as puzzles, we shouldn’t make the mistake of treating poems only as puzzles.” (There’s an echo in that line of my attitude towards LLMs, I think, but I’ll save that for another time.)
That’s probably enough for today—I’ve got a couple of other things to work on. See you soon.