Supersaturation

People will tell you that puzzle solving and drawing have nothing in common. One is this analytical, deductive process and the other is free flowing and creative.

But the first time you look at anything, there’s nothing there. Your brain doesn’t know how to see it. People will say things like “seeing with beginner’s eyes”. And sure, maybe.

But that’s not really how you solve a puzzle, and that’s not really how you think about sketching something. Both have strategies.

Goal #1: Make a mark.

Making a mark on paper is hard than you might imagine. Or at least, it’s harder than people who will give you vague encouragement will tell you. It’s not so simple. Like a puzzle you don’t want to make a terrible mark, but it’s also ok if you make a mark and erase it later. What you want to do is find a spot where you can start asking questions.

Looking at a chair, you think to yourself, this is all too simple and too complex all at once. I must be an idiot for not being able to obviously render what’s in front of me. What are there, like four lines? Maybe 5?

You’ve been staring at the chair a little longer and all of a sudden you notice that the angle of the arm, which would be 90 degrees if you measured it, isn’t actually flat against your eye. It slopes slightly. “That’s strange”, you think. But you sketch the line anyway.

A puzzle is not so different. Maybe it’s a crossword. All of a sudden you see that, oh that’s interesting, the only word that seems to fit there is “CAT”. It doesn’t fit exactly so you’re not 100% certain, but the answer certainly feels like “CAT”, so you write “CAT”.

Goal #2: Zoom Out

Now that you’ve made a mark, you can start to ask questions about it. What are the other lines I could draw that would be similar? What is the relationship between it and the next thing I could draw?

From that one sketch of the arm you make a second mark. This time you notice that there’s the barest hint of a line at the end of the arm so you make it. And then that line trails down, down all the way down in one continuous motion through the whole leg of the chair.

The A in CAT connects to another word: “ANATOMICAL” and now all of a sudden you have all sort of hand holds to hang onto. New avenues to explore.

Goal #3 Repeat

Puzzles, drawing, coding feel a lot like this. You start with something you know and you make a mark. You see how that changes the world. In writing or sketching or puzzles, this means zooming out and staring at it. In coding it might be running a command and seeing what happens. You pause, you see how that matches your current understanding of the world.

Goal #4 Supersaturate

You spend all this time zooming in and out, making all of these marks. Especially if it’s a large puzzle or drawing the marks might not add up to all that much.

It’s like in high school chemistry when you’re dropping a little liquid into a giant beaker. Over and over.

Drop.

Nothing

Drop.

Nothing

Then suddenly, the last drop went in and all of a sudden what was this completely clear liquid substance became solid. A solid crystal structure inside the beaker, where mere moments before had been liquid.

Cracking The Cryptic calls this unlocking. The moment when a puzzle goes from incomprehensible to understandable, and almost rote. You can see the entire picture.

Puzzles, drawing, coding feel a lot like this. You start with something you know and you make a mark. You see how that changes the world. In writing or sketching or puzzles, this means zooming out and staring at it. In coding it might be running a command and seeing what happens. You pause, you see how that matches your current understanding of the world.