Why a story is like a jigsaw puzzle

…or perhaps like one of those slide games where you rearrange the pieces to form a picture.

I’ve been ruminating for a while over a story for a themed anthology. I had the set piece already in mind—my main reason for wanting to write a story for this particular collection is my interest in the setting/era, which I’ve written about a couple of times in the past.

I performed my usual ritual for starting a new story: I opened an old story document and saved it under a new name (to inherit my formatting), clipped out the old text (except for “The End”, which I always leave at the bottom of the doc), came up with a title (this step optional at the beginning, depending on inspiration), zeroed out the word count in the first page header and wrote the first two paragraphs.

That was a few weeks ago. The document remained untouched in the interim. So, I had a little bit of inspiration for a new direction for the story overnight and when I got up this morning I did some Google research and came up with something that fit the bill…but that didn’t really get me any farther in the story. More to mull over, but nothing more to add to the story.

Then I hit the shower. I’m starting to think I should have a shower head installed over my writing chair because that’s where most of my best inspirations occur. If it weren’t for the soggy paper and electronic short circuits issue, I think that would be a great idea. Suddenly two separate, new ideas dropped into place and in a moment I had the story. One of them was a point-of-view idea and the other was a way to twist expectations in a satisfying manner.

Those two paragraphs I wrote a few weeks ago are still in the document, but they probably won’t survive. I wrote a new opening then did a little more research and now I’m ready to tear into this story the next time I get to the keyboard.

Where do stories come from? From little bits and pieces that sometimes seem at first disconnected. It’s only when you slide them around and see how they fit together that the picture is revealed. And when that happens, it’s like a little piece of magic.