Jigsaw Puzzles

I’m obsessed with jigsaw puzzles lately.

They feel like screenwriting but without the living nightmare that is the business of screenwriting.

I’ve been doing them as a warm-up to my real work — a way to jump up and down on the side of the track before the race.

I spread out the pieces on a small whiteboard where, during another movie, like a trapped animal, I had outlined a novel. Now these puzzles pieces are scattered on top of this loose outline, and I am on my hands and knees, looking for connections. Looking for groups of colors or themes or parts that go together. Setting up a frame or organizing principles as a few pieces work together here and there. Occasionally noticing the words written on the board beneath, the foundation. What started this.

This is how screenwriting works.

This is a comforting way for me to go down the ramp because it feels like screenwriting but there are no stakes. Screenwriting is all stakes.

Sometimes on really tense days I’ll pull my MacBook Air onto the floor beside the puzzle and just move back and forth between the script and the puzzle. It’s an effort to soothe my brain:

These two things are the same thing. This is a puzzle with layers and that is a puzzle with layers. Do not be afraid.

The first pitch to describe our VR platform was — it’s going to be like LEGO for VR. It’s gotten a lot bigger and more interesting since then, but I’m thinking about that pitch now because — what our users will be making together will be a kind of VR jigsaw puzzle.

I’ve said frequently that screenwriting is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together where you have to design all the pieces.

When we were in San Francisco founding the company, my co-founder and I talked about that phenomenon where a group of people can gather over a jigsaw puzzle and start cooperating to match pieces, group like pieces with like pieces, fit pieces together, build frames. All without speaking.

This is called emergence.

I hope we will be able to harness emergence — a secret, silent, unconscious process that will power our community growth.

Because emergence is the nature of nature. It is our nature to form groups to come together and start handing pieces to one another.