Taking The Pieces Out Of The Box


In my last post I quoted David Lynch speaking on his process and how he compares ideas to puzzle pieces that he receives individually from some other room

He says he slowly collects these pieces one by one until he has them all, then he begins putting them together. 

This is a pretty simple analogy for the process of making anything, but it’s been swirling in my brain recently and I’d like to find out why.

I’m working on a bigger project at the moment, or at least trying to, and I’m still on this puzzle piece collecting stage, although I seem to be in denial of it. Most of the pieces are still in the box, but I’ve taken out a few handfuls and have already started to try to put them together. Needless to say, the odds that all of these choice pieces fitting together when they’ve been selected at random is very slim. 

Sure, I’ve got a few that connect, but the majority don’t and I’m getting frustrated by this.

It’s sort of a mountain fever type thing. Oliver Burkeman’s book, The Antidote, goes into some detail about this phenomenon. In short, it’s when mountain climbers push safety to the side when the peak of their mountain is just within sight. They’ll keep moving forward, even when everything – health issues, equipment malfunctions, poor weather… – starts yelling at them to turn back. This is where most casualties in mountain climbing come from.

I think that prior to a rough draft—which is a cohesive, whole piece of writing, just without the flair and style of an edit—you must have a collection phase, and you must collect enough pieces before you can start to try and put the project together.

Keep collecting pieces, keep those pieces organized, and only start to link them when you’ve for sure stockpiled enough.