A Jigsaw Puzzle World

 

Two or three weeks ago I started a jigsaw puzzle created by Bits and Pieces using a painting of the Last Supper by Ruane Manning. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it until this Thursday, which was a week after we celebrated the event it commemorates. Nonetheless, it’s never too late to remember the Last Supper or its aftermath.

The puzzle was a fitting activity for Holy Week and the days following Easter. It also reminded me of a poem I wrote in 2022. It’s rather juvenile and will never win a prize, but the thought fits the season. So here it is for your reading pleasure.

A Jigsaw Puzzle World

The world was in pieces,

     Broken by Sin.

Then Jesus came

     To put it together again.

If you’re groaning at how bad that was, I’ll leave you with this cliché.

It’s the thought that counts.

A Puzzling Situation

 I like doing jigsaw puzzles, so several years ago Roland got me a puzzle table for Christmas. This year I received three puzzles—one from Caroline and Pete, and two from Roland.

Caroline and Pete had seen the Ghent Altarpiece while in Brussels on vacation this past summer, so they gave me a jigsaw puzzle of the interior panels. At 8 X 10 inches with 110 pieces, it was smaller than most of the ones I do but still challenging enough to keep my interest. It also fit on my puzzle table and left plenty of room to lay out pieces around it.

When Roland bought the puzzle table, he figured that would make for easy gifts in subsequent years, when he could buy me the puzzles to go on it. But this year he discovered that he still needs to pay attention to the puzzles he buys. In particular, he bought me two 1000 piece puzzles that are 24 X 30 inches. Unfortunately, the puzzle surface on the table is more like 22 X 31. Wide enough, but not deep enough.

We considered laying a board or some other rigid surface over the puzzle table, but we didn’t have anything that would work. Buying a piece of plywood from Home Depot or Lowes was an option, but we would rather work with what we already have.

The only other choice was to use the dining room table, but that wouldn’t leave us enough room to spread out comfortably during meals. Then I remembered the leaf. Adding it to the table gave us just enough room. Problem solved.

It just takes a little ingenuity to resolve a puzzling situation.

Jigsaw Puzzles and Stories Need Substance

 

I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, so Roland gave me a “Personalized Hometown Puzzle” of DeTour Village, Michigan, for Christmas. DeTour is the light gray spot on the mainland in the upper right-hand corner of the puzzle. Unfortunately, the people who made the puzzle didn’t put any thought into it. As long as it contained DeTour, they didn’t care what was around it. And that’s why I finally gave up, as you can see from the darker gray areas that show the mat (also a present from Roland) below the puzzle.

Putting some of the land together was difficult, but I enjoyed the challenge. Then I got to Lake Huron. There are a few places with writing identifying reefs and shoals, but most of it is simply a uniform blue. Even the shapes of the pieces didn’t help because too many are similar on the two or three sides that matched the part I had completed. But if I put them in the wrong spot, nothing I tried after that would fit. I did replace several pieces with others in an effort to find the right ones, but that didn’t work, either.

So I gave up.

It didn’t have to be that way. All the puzzle maker had to do was move the image north, and possibly a little bit west, so that the puzzle area was mostly land.

Writing fiction is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Each piece must fit in its place to make a cohesive whole, and the story needs substance to give the reader clues about where each piece fits. Too many passages that don’t add to the story make a reader give up before finishing the book, which also loses the author an audience for the next one.

That’s where it becomes important to cut unnecessary material. Sometimes that’s all I have to do. But if it’s not enough, maybe I need to move the story north (figuratively speaking) and possibly a little bit west.

Because jigsaw puzzles and stories both need substance.