I had no interest in jigsaw puzzles, until I saw my mother doing one just last year. In her Connecticut home, my mother was hunched over a table covered with puzzle pieces. She was grouping them by color, while studying the image on the box that they would become -- a lush garden filled with several different types of flowers.

“I give up,” she said, scooting out of her chair. “You want to try?” she asked.

At the time, I was writing the second season of a web series -- 10 episodes in total. After I wrote the first drafts, I jotted down the plot points of each episode on pieces of paper in thick marker. I scotch taped the pages to my wall to see the overall story arc. With my show on the wall, all I saw were problems. The gaping plot holes, the inconsistent storylines, the underdeveloped characters. My episodes were fragments of a larger picture I didn’t see.

In front of the jigsaw puzzle my mother momentarily gave up on, I was presented with another kind of mess that needed to be cleaned up and solved. Because I had a picture to refer to, I was motivated to figure it out.

“You’re making progress,” my mother said, looking over my shoulder.

After a hour and half, I had pieced together a bunch of blue flowers and a few bright sunflowers.

For the rest of my stay, my mother and I took turns tackling the flower puzzle. For her, she said it was a fantastic way to waste time. For me, it became a form of therapy.

I went back to work on my episodic storyboard. This time, I confronted it with a new perspective. My show was now a puzzle. Even though I did not have a physical picture to refer to, I saw the plot points on my wall as large puzzle pieces that my characters, the smaller pieces, needed to fit into. I rearranged moments in time, connected storylines, and developed relationships between characters. Eventually, I started to see a picture forming, one that I could work with.