Learning from chocolate:

How to honor the wait

Last week in Costa Rica, we toured a small chocolate farm thinking that our chocolate-loving toddler would appreciate an excursion complete with tasty samples to balance out the rainy waterfall hikes we subjected her to. It turned out to be her grumpiest afternoon of the trip. But even though it wasn’t the toddler hit we hoped for, our tour got me thinking about writing and waiting.

Halfway through the tour, we cracked open a football-shaped cacao pod to see the large beans inside surrounded by a sticky white pulp. Strange and, it turns out, not at all chocolatey delicious.

The tour then skipped ahead to the part where seeds get ground down into a crumbly mix that ultimately becomes chocolate. But, our guide tells us, this is only after weeks of fermenting and months of drying the seeds, and then roasting them. The small fermented, dried, and roasted seeds hardly resemble the large ones we just saw surrounded by a white pulp. They are something else entirely.

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash

This got me thinking about the waiting steps in any creative process, and how they aren’t the parts that get talked about in tours. People always ask about the generating process in novel writing. They want to know how I got words on the page, and how quickly. They never ask, “So what happened during those months when you weren’t writing?”

But the time between typing sessions matters. It can be when a book becomes something better.

A friend recently asked if my writing insights usually come through thinking hard about the book or from letting it be. The answer is some of both. Nothing happens without some amount of intention. But hard thinking rarely does it for me. It’s more like light thinking—letting the writing ferment and roast in the back of my mind.

This is what the first draft of my novel has been doing the last few months, and I’ve been debating whether I am letting it be for good reasons or avoiding it. This is a fine line, and I don’t always know which side of it I’m on.

But the night after this chocolate tour, I woke in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. I’d had a dream about my main characters, and without yet knowing the contours of what the dream meant, I already knew: I am circling closer to the next layer the book needs.

Startling as the dream had been, I fell back to sleep easily, with the sweetness of that day’s chocolate still on my tongue.