When I read a piece of writing, whether prose or poem, I often find myself wondering how the writer developed the piece. Did they start with an initial image, or a single line and build the rest of the piece around it? Was there a particular emotion they set out to convey, or a bit of action, or story twist that drove the narrative from the beginning? Some writers need to find an opening line before the rest of the piece is able to unfold. Others can start somewhere in the middle and skip forward and back as they construct their stories. Some writers are especially adept at endings; they know from the start where the story is going and just need to figure out how to get there.
I am surprised by how often a piece of writing develops in a way I wasn’t expecting. It is one of my favorite things about writing—the way the piece itself can take over and follow paths you didn’t plan on taking. While it’s nice to not necessarily know how the sausage was made and leave all interpretation up to the reader, I think insights into how a piece was created can be really interesting and even helpful to developing one’s own work. So I’ve decided to share how some of my pieces were crafted. I’m hoping to share one a month, or so, with a nice variety of fiction and nonfiction prose, and poetry.
For the first post in this series, I’m starting with my short story, “Still, Life (With Avocados) in the Spring Edition of Capsule Stories, which is available for purchase in paperback and ebook. The theme for this edition was In Bloom, and I wrote this story specifically for this theme.
You can read “Still, Life (With Avocados)” in full here if you’d like (I recommend reading it first!) and then continue below to learn more about how this story came together.
Content Warning: Death & Grieving
The jar would sit on the windowsill in the dining room alongside all the others, avocado pits lined like votive candles at a prayer altar
I started this story with a specific image in my head: A row of avocado pits placed in small mason jars lined up on a windowsill. For a period of time, in design blogs, Instagram posts, even in my friend’s kitchens, I felt like everywhere I looked people were trying to grow avocado plants from pits. I remember looking up how to do it once and reading that an avocado plant grown from a pit would likely never bear fruit, and even if it eventually did, it could take over a decade to make it happen. I imagined a person excited to grow their own avocados, not knowing that the most they could reasonably hope for would be a pleasant houseplant. There was a bit of sadness in this image for me, the hopeful effort of attempting to grow something that would never actually bloom. From that idea, the story of Elizabeth and her avocado pits was born.
It seemed an apt metaphor for grief, the work of moving toward a point you would never reach, healing that would never fully blossom. So I knew I wanted Elizabeth to be grieving something, and to be in the process of trying to emerge from the darkest point of her pain at the same time as the world around her was beginning to emerge from winter.
Half the battle was pretending you were okay. Waking each morning to say, “Today will be fine.” Trying to speak the words into existence, slowly letting the lie turn into truth.
It would be easier now that the weather was shifting, hard ground softening into damp earth. The promise of spring. Mornings that smelled of dirt, rebirth, possibility.
Initially, I had thought her grief would center around a lost pregnancy or some form of maternal grieving, but that ultimately felt a bit like trying to incorporate too many levels of “blooming.” I was playing around with the story in my head one evening while washing dishes and the window above our kitchen sink looks out across an alley and into our neighbors’ backyards. One neighbor’s fence is lined with trees that bloom early in spring, blossoming with lovely little white flowers that smell horrible. My husband and I often lament how unfortunate it is that the first scent of spring is the stench of hot feet wafting from these trees. I liked the way that image slightly undercuts the beauty of spring, and introduces an imperfection to this season of hope and rejuvenation. Once I had that in my mind, I decided Elizabeth would be grieving the death of her spouse.
The tree across the alley had begun to sprout. She could see it from her kitchen window, the tiny white buds like blemishes popping through the skin of the tree bark. It was one of those stinky trees—she could never remember what they were called—the little white flowers filling the air with a scent that made her nose scrunch up the moment she stepped outside to pull the garbage cans to the curb.
“Ah, the sweet smell of spring,” he would joke each year, hands on his hips, sucking a deep breath in through his nose. This year it would have to be her, taking the deep breath, making the joke. It was so painful, all the ways the world kept reminding her of what she had lost.
I have always found spring to be a hopeful season, and yet at the same time, I feel a sort of melancholy awareness of how fleeting that sense of renewal and rebirth can be, how it is just one small part of a cycle that will continue to repeat itself. The heat and humidity of summer are close at hand, the desolate darkness of winter will come back again. Grief too can be cyclical, the pain of a loss returning, again and again, a season of darkness from which one must repeatedly emerge. Though in time it becomes less effortful, it never goes away completely. There is no endpoint for healing, only a slow continual process. There is a real sadness in the avocados as a stand-in for Elizabeth’s healing, in knowing that they may never grow, she may never heal. I wanted the emphasis to be on the work of healing, though, on the effort required to move forward and grow.
She inspected each of the avocado pits for signs of growth. No roots snaking down into the water. No cracks in the smooth brown shells of the seeds. No tiny sprouts pushing skyward.
“You can do this,” she said, gently touching the top of each pit with the tip of her finger. “Take your time. There’s no rush.” She would wait patiently. It was amazing, she thought, how sometimes the world changed in an instant, flipped upside down so that one second it looked one way and the next it was completely unrecognizable. And how other times it changed only by force, through steady deliberate effort, the quiet will to push forward again and again, up and out of the dark, to make a series of tiny cracks through the hard surface of the world, everything slowly bringing itself back to life.
And in the end, I wanted to leave Elizabeth with a sense of hopefulness, for it is spring after all.
The avocado pits would grow. She could feel it. She believed it.
“You’re doing fine,” she said aloud. “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”