Recently, the author Annabelle Tometich visited my class to talk about her debut book The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, and the conversation was, frankly, epic. She and my students talked about discerning whether most of the scenes in your first draft are really just different versions of the same scene (probably); the difference between keeping your reader in mind and pandering to them; and how to write about identity without lapsing into nationalism.
But my favorite moment came when somebody asked Annabelle why she wrote a pivotal scene in the book the way she did, ending it where she did, and Annabelle answered, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember.”
She said that a few times, about writerly decisions large (how did she hit on the five-part mango-tree inspired structure?) and small (why did she use second person to start Chapter 24?).
Annabelle made plenty of conscious choices when it came to writing her book, from its themes of growing up mixed-race in Florida to its title to its structure. But when it came to what some people call process, she just wasn’t aware of it.
“Every time I realized what should be next, I hurried to get it down on the page as quickly as possible,” she said. “Often I realized what should be next when I was at the grocery store or driving in my car, and I would rush to write it down when I got home.”
This thing we call process, it’s mysterious by nature. We’re not talking about the efforts you make to get the words out of your head and onto the page, nor the routine you use to make time for your creative work. We’re talking the means by which a writer realizes what a story needs next, and then creates it.
Or as novelist George Saunders described it, the writer doesn’t necessarily decide what scene to write, what point of view to use, or even choose their words.
“It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to [the artist] to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal ‘Yes.’ He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them,” Saunders wrote.
And the most impactful choices are the most inchoate, and incremental. A word or a sentence, added or deleted. Saunders likened it to a cruise ship turning.
Annabelle compared it to her mother choosing mango pits. Her family would go mango-picking at an orchard every year, and her mother would inspect every mango, choosing just a few pits to try to coax into seedlings. Some sprouted; some didn’t. A few became actual trees.
Did her mother have a process for making those choices? Did Annabelle when making hers?
“As much as you can call it a process, I guess?” Annabelle said. “I don’t really know!”
Kelly Caldwell
Dean of Faculty