Plot Puzzles

I’m an avid puzzle doer. No jigsaw puzzles, although I’m happy to sit down with a tv show in the background and try to fit some pieces together. No - word puzzles. The kind you get at the drug store in a flimsy newsprint book, usually labeled something like “Variety Puzzles” or “Puzzles 4 Less Super Pak”. During Covid, you would rarely find me without one of them, and my kids learned which kinds they enjoyed as well.

My favorite part of doing puzzles is the moment when it all turns. I often do the Sunday crossword and it always starts the same way. First, you fill in the ones you know without a doubt - the actor’s names or book titles or acronyms. Then you go square by square, figuring out the ones you think you know, then checking and double checking your guesses against the other clues.

But there’s always the trick clues. Most Sunday crosswords have a twist. Sometimes it’s a play on words. Sometimes it’s a funky way of writing out the answers where they turn up or down halfway through. Sometimes, when the creator is being really devilish, they have a square that contains more than one letter or a symbol or something. And so I hack and hack at the conventional clues and eventually figure out the trick but still, it’s hard going.

Until, one moment, a moment I can’t quantify, when the whole puzzle turns. It all gets easier. The answers that I had only guessed at are now confirmed. I’ve gotten the hang of the trick. And even those actors’ names or book titles I don’t know are easy to figure out.

I love it. It’s like riding downhill on a bike.

This is the feeling I love about writing a book, too. One of the hardest parts about writing a book is figuring out how all the pieces go together. How this plot and that character arc need to intertwine. How this hanging thread will weave into a final scene. How the theme I started with will play out across the storyline. To me, it feels like one big puzzle.

A lot of people think that writing is about making works sound pretty, about making pictures in people’s imaginations. And those words are important, but only insofar as they work to earn their place. Those words are the tools you use to tell the story, to show the characters, to communicate the theme. And they had better work for you, not against you.

We’ve all read a book where the author is a little too in love with the sound of their own voice. I think we all have different tolerances for poetic language, but I think even the most metaphor-loving amongst us can fed up when we don’t feel like that poetry is doing anything for the story. Intricate descriptions of settings that are only used for scene. Long, winding characterizations that are immediately betrayed by a character’s actions. Extensive pontification by an author who has a message to share and is not going to let you get away without hearing it.

We’ve all been there. I’m sure there are still parts of my books like that, no matter how hard I try to restrain myself. Just like my crosswords, success only comes when you get the right answers in the right words. It’s not enough to know a synonym for “smart” - you’ve got to know a six-letter word ending in “R”. And if you’re not “clever” enough - in writing or in puzzling, the pieces will never fit together properly