Scrabble-Tile Thinking

metaphor for the cognitive process of editing, where individual clips are treated like Scrabble tiles—external tokens of information. Meaning is not found by simply looking inward, but by physically arranging, rearranging, and juxtaposing these external elements to discover new combinations and emergent ideas. This process is an active, external manipulation that forms a crucial part of the editor's thought process. This philosophy is central to collage-based filmmakers like John Wilson, who collect a vast inventory of observational footage and found media, treating each clip as a tile to be rearranged and combined in the edit to form new "words" and "sentences" (i.e., ideas and narrative threads).