For Christmas, some
elderly friends of ours bought the boys a 500 piece jigsaw each. Initially I thought the boxes would be
consigned to the cupboard, unopened. How
could a jigsaw possibly compete with today's technology? But I was wrong, I'm pleased to say. In the quiet days between Christmas and New
Year, we opened up the box, picked out the edge pieces and started to put it together.
At first I thought we
would never finish it, there were too many pieces in the box and a huge blank
space in the middle of the board, but gradually we started to fill in all those
spaces, moved some pieces around that had been put in the wrong place, and
eventually we had the complete picture.
And while we were
doing it, it struck me how like writing a novel, doing a jigsaw is. The edge pieces are the plot, the middle the
slog of the first draft, and trying the pieces in difference places is the
editing.
The whole process is
both addictive and frustrating but the final picture at the end is well worth
the effort.
Just need to find the
time to do the other one. Oh, and write that novel of course.
