On writing Puz_le

We have a second home in Vermont, a nice rambling farmhouse to which we repair every now and then. It's rather too much house for a weekend house but we expect we may retire there one day so we scraped up the cash to buy it before we lost it. It dates back to the very late eighteenth or early nineteenth century (at least some of the foundation stones do) and the formal rooms in front are Georgian in feel (or Federalist if you find the term "Georgian" to be unpatriotic). Formal, four-square in proportions, with deep-set sash windows, twelve over twelve, and fireplaces. So what? you're asking.

The so-what is that the rest of the house has been renovated so often, including by us, that it is nearly impossible to say how old it is or which part came when. And because the house was used as a farmhouse for most of its life to date, but more recently a house for an artist, who sold it to us, there are dependencies and appendages of barns turned into garages turned into studios, etc., and the place frankly is too big for us. When one wants to be alone one can always find a place to be alone.

One weekend when the rain kept us from splashing about in the frog pond or climbing the hill to hunt for blueberries, bears, or basilisks, I was called from my reading or cooking or whatever I was doing by my seven year old daughter, Helen. She was bored and at loose ends, and her brothers were watching a Lord of the Rings video filled with battles and cheery dismemberments and scary monsters, and she didn't care to join them if no one was singing and dancing through the mayhem.

I found in the cupboard a puzzle I had picked up for 99 cents. We took it to one of the front rooms, away from the sound of video catastrophe. The rain sliced the view into threads like Christmas tinsel. We felt very much alone as we began to spill the pieces out of the box--as if we were alone in a house without the rest of the family banging about.

It was a dragon puzzle and frankly it was a little easy, so to drag it out I began to tell a story about it as I was helping her find the pieces to frame the edges. The dragon looked a little bored with only half a face, but by the time we found the piece that appointed him with a snout he began to seem a little more menacing and a little more interested. Perhaps, one might say, puzzled.

I do not remember if we lost a piece, but I do remember thinking "There has been an awful lot written about pictures coming to life, people walking into books and paintings and even the internet, but a puzzle is a kind of throw-away genre, like a newspaper: once you've done it, you're done with it. What if there was a puzzle that had more character than that?"

When we were finished with the puzzle I went upstairs and wrote the basic outline of "Puz_le." I had to figure out why it might be important that this puzzle was threatening to this particular child, and that was the fun part. Working out the puzzle of the plot--looking at what you have in the outline or in the opening scene or sentence, and extrapolating from it or deducing from it or extending from the evidence your subconscious has provided to a conclusion that is at the same time both surprising and, when you come to think about it, inevitable--well, that is the joy of writing. Making of the puzzle of circumstances something that has meaning.

I have wondered whether it is the first chapter of a novel, but I do not know. That is still a puzzle to me.

Gregory