Letters From Kelly

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

Lately, my students and I are preoccupied with psychic (or narrative) distance, or how close the reader feels to a story. In close psychic distance, the reader stands next to the characters, perhaps even sitting in their laps. Long psychic distance puts the reader across the street, or in a hot air balloon overhead, or looking down from heaven.

John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction, “In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.” Writers often interpret that to mean the change should be imperceptible.

And sure, that works. In her story “Snowfall,” Deesha Philyaw uses first-person plural to plunk her readers as close to her characters Arletha and Rhonda as possible— or so you think.

“We, who apparently are built for everything, are simply not built for this. No gloves exist that keep our hands from freezing as we move snow and ice from one spot to another and from the car windshield. And no, the physical activity does not warm us up. It makes usresentful.”

Later, Philyaw uses second person to pull the reader even closer:

“In the South, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up a half an hour early to remedy what has been done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway and your car, as you slept.”

The tightening psychic distance in “Snowfall” is a tractor beam—invisible and inescapable.

But you can be equally effective when your reader is acutely aware of the change.

In his film Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock starts viewers medium-close to Richard, who may or may not have murdered his ex-wife. The audience is close enough to suspect him, but not enough to be sure.

Then, another character kills someone, and we’re in the room where it happens.

The film then alternates between Richard and the real killer, Hitchcock keeping his audience uncomfortably close to the murderer. We’re walking right alongside him as he runs into his former co-worker Babs, as they stroll through London, as he invites Babs to see his apartment. At this point, the audience is trying to use its close psychic distance to psychically communicate STAY OUT OF THE APARTMENT, BABS!

Spoiler: Babs goes into the apartment.

And then, famously, the camera leaves.

It backs away from the closed door, down three flights of a winding, silent stairwell, onto the sidewalk, and across the street, people and cars filling the space between the audience and the building. We’re as far from that apartment as we can get without a rocket.

I saw Frenzy in a crowded theater, and when that camera started gliding backward, the once-quiet audience started shouting, “GobackgobackGOBACK!”

Different stories, different styles, different distances, but one thing’s the same. When Philyaw and Hitchcock shift the psychic distance, the story intensifies.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Last week Gothamist managed to get hold of a hand-drawn map of the interior of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, created by the student protesters who were occupying it.

It marked off an area for smoking, and its legend noted where you could find a ladder, water fountains or “tons of books.”

Of course it immediately became a Rorschach test for how people feel about the campus protests dominating the news of late—how someone interprets the symbols and legends likely reveals more about them than about the map or mapmakers themselves.

Which is what delights me about this map, and all maps really. They’re never, ever solely about geography.

“The power of maps to fire imagination is well known,” novelist Michael Chabon wrote in his essay collection Maps and Legends. “And there is no map so seductive as the one marked…by the romantic blank of unexplored territory.”  

And is there a more fertile or fascinating unexplored territory than a writer’s subconscious? I doubt it.

Coincidentally, this spring, I’ve been asking my Gotham students to do some mapmaking of their own—with thrilling, surprising results. I think that’s because sketching a map taps three big wells:

• Drawing something, anything, coaxes thoughts and ideas to burble up from your mind’s depths into your imagination, and to emerge on paper, where they can make themselves useful.
• Sketching out a place in your story —an imaginary country, a ghost town, your childhood bedroom — helps you find the borders of the place, and also, your story. You’ll identify, too, the borders of those “romantic blanks of unexplored territory” you may not yet know exist. Of course, once you know where a border lies, you can cross it, and explore.
• Maps require symbols and legends, designating landmarks, locations of high value. Desert maps take pains to mark the points where a traveler would find water; ghost tour maps mark the sites places where apparitions have visited, as well as cemeteries and burial grounds. Locating and naming landmarks forces writers to identify what’s valuable in a story; choosing the symbols and creating the legend to explain them encourages you to explore why those places deserve to be landmarks, and what they mean.

Once you’ve mapped a place, you cannot help but start to think about the people who’ve moved through it — the locals, the visitors, the settlers, the plunderers, the commuters, the lost. The characters of your story, in other words. They come to you.

Try it yourself: Sketch out a map of a place in your current WIP. See what borders you add, which ones mark the undiscovered lands. Then, add symbols for only the landmarks that are meaningful to the protagonist. Write a scene at one of those landmarks.

See what adventures await you.

Kelly Caldwell,

Dean of Faculty