Making a puzzle

There's a sense in which writing this first draft is like constructing a puzzle piece by piece. You have an odd shape, you paint on it; you make another odd shape that can fit against it, paint so that the connection is coherent; add a third etc; and so on, adding more pieces, piece by piece, vignette by vignette, with the goal of having a great coherent image made up of all these tiny individual self-contained pieces.

Rewriting is always, ALWAYS, the most fun part of the process. This, the chaotic initial draft, is fun, too, if you let it be, and I do because I trust the process so much, because I've been successful with it for almost half a century, but there still is a tad of stress here, in the creation stage, nothing is really certain. But once you have a draft, then the process becomes more logical, more manipulative, now it's more like becoming a magician and designing a trick, you want to pull off the trick without the audience seeing how you do it. In the early part, I feel like a stranger in a strange land, but during rewriting I feel like God.