My compulsion to write the story was from seeing so many people go unpunished, and so many innocents' stories being untold… - Colson Whitehead

I ask myself: Is the outlook of this book comic? Is it tragic? Is the story best served by a first person narrator who's telling his or her story? Is it best served by an omniscient narrator who can stand above and make connections about the characters and society and politics? Part of figuring out how to tell the story is tone and voice, the same way I'm picking characters and places.

I never know when I start out. You know, I sort of know what the ending is. I know where the characters always end up, and I usually have an image of the last page before I start. I'm a big outliner. But you can't know everything and you have to be open to discovery…

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.