Puzzling Out Perspective

My mom and I used to do jigsaw puzzles all the time. When I was in that mode, I would look around the world and gauge the scenery by how easy or difficult it would be to reconstruct if it was cut into a thousand interlocking pieces. It’s been a long time since I did a puzzle, but every now and then I will still look at the world around me and see if I could reconstruct it if it was cut up and put in a rectangular box. After puzzles, my mom moved on to water color and I to writing. Now, she talks about how she knows what colors she’d have to combine to capture the beauty of the changing fall leaves or the specific grays she needs to create to paint Yosemite’s towering granite cliffs. It strikes me every time she says it that she needs reds and purples to get the right hue and I’ve seen the finished products. I know she’s right.

As a writer, I look around at the world and look at what words best fit what I see. When I translate that to story, I have to make sure that I leave behind my own words for a situation and take on the perspective of my point of view character. Sometimes, it’s like putting together a ten thousand piece puzzle that is nothing but sky. But, the more pieces I get in place, the easier it is to match the subtle blues where they belong. In the same way, the better I know my character, the easier it is to slip into their perspective and write the scene in their voice with their experiences.

It’s no surprise that some characters are easier to write than others. This happens for about a million reasons from the character having a lot in common with me to the book coming together in my head easily. These are the joyous times when the writing flows out or at least the character does. I find that my hardest book had the easiest characters for me to understand. Maybe because I needed a comfortable voice to tackle a really hard topic. Other times, it’s like the character got into the wrong head and really should’ve been someone else’s idea. These books are a challenge and I get a lot of editing help from my trusted critique partners and ultimately my agent. (See my post on the agent-author relationship if you’re curious how that works.) But, in the end, easy character or hard, a hundred piece puzzle or ten thousand piece puzzle of only sky, each book gets written and each puzzle gets put together. It’s all a matter of getting into the perspective and putting in each piece until the last one is in place.