A story is like a jigsaw puzzle

5 tips for young writers from Allison Rushby

This post for paid subscribers was written by Allison Rushby from Team YKNR.

When I’m speaking in schools, I often ask the children in the audience if any of them want to be a writer when they grow up. There are usually a few who say they do.

And sometimes there are one or two who are already showing signs that they might actually become just that.

I’ve had attendees trot up to me after a talk with a short story they wrote the night before, a fleshed out synopsis for seven (seven!) books, and once even 20,000 words of a novel already underway.

Not too long ago, I also had a student who said she really wanted to write a novel, but that she didn’t think she’d be able to do it because “novels are too long”.

I knew what she meant.

I’ve just finished writing a 90,000 word novel and at the start of that manuscript, I was saying something along the same lines. Writing a novel was too long. Too hard. Too much.

But, also, I knew it wasn’t. Because while 90,000 words is a lot of words. I’ve completed enough novels now to know that you simply can’t view the writing of a novel in its entirety. You have to break it down.

A 90,000 word novel isn’t really a 90,000 word novel. It’s thirty chapters. Or sixty scenes. Or ninety days of sitting yourself down in the study when you might not want to and bashing out a thousand words.

I also know that while you might end up with that 90,000 word big picture, you’re much better off not thinking about that at all, but approaching your novel as a whole bunch of jigsaw puzzle pieces. Pieces that need to be put together to get you to that wonderful completed image of a wintry landscape, or English country cottage, super-cute basket of puppies or whatever it is that you’ve picked out to puzzle together.

Thinking about all of this, I decided to write a new talk to deliver to Prep to Year Three, based around my new junior fiction illustrated series The Wish Sisters.

Allison Rushby puzzles out the writing process at a recent author talk.

I thought it would be a great idea to get in early. To show younger students how a story works.

How you can start with an idea that’s sort of like the edge pieces of your story puzzle and take things from there? Let’s take a look.