This November, storytelling is back in Sarasota. Sarasota County Libraries and Historical Resources is hosting the 2025 Off the Page Literary celebration, a month-long event that features bestselling authors, writing workshops and other events with all 10 library locations participating. The authors at Off the Page run the gamut from iconic bestselling authors like Amy Tan to local love gurus such as Lisa Daily and everything in between. SRQ Magazine profiled just a few of the authors, including Tan, Daily, Fort Myers native Annabelle Tometich and children’s author/illustrator Ben Clanton, to gain an inside look as to what storytelling means to them.
Finding Her Truth with Amy Tan
“People think that fiction is a bunch of lies, but that is so far from what it really is,” says Amy Tan, author of seven New York Times bestselling books and the keynote author of the Off the Page Literary Celebration. “Yes, you make up the details. Do we call that a lie? It’s not a lie, it’s an imaginative part of storywriting. What is true is the sense of something, the sense of tragedy, of hope, of pure, unexpected joy.” Tan has been discovering her own truth through fiction since the debut of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1989. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Tan’s works have become integral to the American literary canon—often depicting the peaks and valleys of mother-daughter relationships, Tan’s novels are both deeply personal and highly relatable to millions of readers around the world.
In 2024, Tan’s authorship took a turn when she penned The Backyard Bird Chronicles, a written and illustrated account of how birding has changed her life. Taking the time to be in nature, to truly ingest all that is around her, brought Tan solace in a time where she found it difficult to write. “I was somewhat distressed by the amount of racism in our country and I became much more aware of it directed towards Asian people,” says Tan.“I felt I couldn’t write, because when I’m writing I have to get into a certain kind of mood. I can’t be in despair when I’m writing.”
The act of chronicling the different types of birds Tan found in her backyard, of sketching them and thinking intently about their journeys, allowed her to access the parts of herself needed to create compelling characters. “I have to be compassionate to my characters when I write a story. And sometimes I don’t always feel compassionate. You know, I’ve had a bad day or bad experience with someone, but I have to regain that in my life,” says Tan. “I have to have a mystery, I have to have drama and every day with the birds, there’s drama in my yard. There’s a story unfolding and that gets me very excited.”
Looking for Love with Lisa Daily
Lisa Daily knows a thing or two about love—and writing love stories. Daily is not only a USA Today bestselling author, having penned nonfiction works like Stop Getting Dumped and novels such as Fifteen Minutes of Shame alike, she is also a dating expert and a book coach. Better yet, she’s a Sarasota resident who loves to write on Siesta Key. In her program at the Off the Page Literary Celebration, Daily spoke on the keys to writing a good romance novel and how to take the ideas out of your brain and onto the page.
One of the essential elements of a romance novel, Daily says, is the ending. “Romance novels always must have either a happy for now or happily ever after type of ending and this is a challenge,” says Daily. “There are a lot of people who think if there is a romantic subplot or romance at all in the book that makes it a romance novel, but romance readers are very particular. They want their happily ever after ending and if you don’t deliver it, they’ll come after you with pitchforks.”
Although romance stories have evolved from the early 2000s heyday of the rom-com—think more diverse characters and greater consideration of consent—the core tenets of a successful romance story remain the same. Daily follows a three act structure: “Act one put your characters in a tree. Act two set the tree on fire. Act three get your characters out of the tree.” In a romance novel, the story goal is the relationship—the couple must end up together. How the characters get to that point, the obstacles they encounter and the things that they learn about themselves along the way is what makes for a compelling read.
“When you’re plotting romance, you need to determine the goal of each character, what is it that they’re trying to do throughout the story, aside from the relationship aspect, and what are the things that are holding them back in their lives?” says Daily. “Those are the pieces of the characters that writers need to focus on and it works best if they match up—if the flaw that I need to overcome is what sets off your personal journey—which is always the case in our strongest relationships. Those are the relationships that make us grow as people and in a romance novel, that’s just compacted into 75,000 words.”
Stories Within with Annabelle Tometich
There have always been stories inside of Annabelle Tometich. They just took some time to make it out of her head and onto the page. Tometich, who published her debut memoir, The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony, in 2024 to widespread acclaim, did not initially set out to write a memoir. In fact, Tometich, who’d worked as a food-critic and restaurant writer for The News-Press in her hometown of Fort Myers, first wanted to write a cookbook.
“When I first started writing The Mango Tree, I had a very journalistic approach to it,” says Tometich. “I thought I could write this quirky cookbook, since I’m a food writer, that’s an essay collection with stories about the interesting childhood I had and put recipes in it that were tangential to the stories. I cobbled something together and it didn’t really make sense.” Tometich’s inspiration to write something different from her work came out of desperation. In 2019, Tometich had just turned down an offer to be the new food critic at the Tampa Bay Times. A “mid-life” crisis began—with Tometich questioning her career path—which led to the idea to create a cookbook. What she found, however, after sharing the initial draft with her close friend and fellow memoirist Artis Henderson, were that the essays in the “cookbook” where Tometich laid herself bare were in fact the best parts.
“She told me if I could get rid of the recipes and find a way to connect these essays, then I’d have a powerful memoir. She’d highlight these sections that were few and far between and said that ‘when you’re vulnerable and super honest, that’s your best writing,’ which is counterintuitive to everything you learn in journalism,” says Tometich. “I’d written all of these first-person restaurant reviews for a long time, and figured if I just leaned into that and mentally pretended it’s not my story that I’m telling, then we’ll see where it goes. Having written so much in the past, I did have a voice in a way I didn’t know existed.”
The Mango Tree—named after the 2015 incident in which Tometich’s mother, a Filipina immigrant, was arrested for shooting a BB gun at a trespasser stealing mangos from her mango tree—is not always an easy read. The memoir delves into some of the toughest moments of Tometich’s upbringing and digs up the ghosts of her past in a sometimes humorous, but more often heartfelt manner. “It’s weird how not difficult it turned out to be. I felt in my head, ‘oh my gosh, you’re going to sit with some of the most traumatic moments of your childhood,’ and when I got to these memories it was fascinating how perfectly intact they were,” says Tometich. “What I learned from all of this is that I have enough distance from this time in my life to where it doesn’t hurt me anymore. That is a really nice place to have reached in my life.”
Inspiration in Imagination with Ben Clanton
Writing, for many, can conjure up images of stress. Of emotional turmoil, of banging one’s head against the wall trying in vain to come up with some spark of creative inspiration. Sure, writing does have those moments—but it also contains countless moments of artistic joy, where the ideas in one’s head finally make it onto the page. Author and illustrator Ben Clanton knows this. Perhaps it’s because of the types of stories he tells—Clanton is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning creator of the Narwhal and Jelly graphic novel series—but more than likely, it’s due to the endearing attitude he brings to his craft.
Clanton, who will host a “Family Day” during the Off the Page Literary Celebration on November 8, has made a career working in children’s literature due to a willingness to explore the depths of his imagination. “It’s funny that I did become an author and illustrator as I wasn’t so sure about books as a kid. Learning to read was a big struggle for me,” says Clanton, who became interested in the children’s book space while volunteering at the school library in college. “I loved reading books with students. I found myself wondering, what would it look like if I tried making a book? Would I enjoy making them as much as I do reading them?”
For Clanton, the whimsical and wacky characters that populate his books are often the product of doodling—years of it. Clanton says that he wants to get to know the characters so that they become real to him before writing their stories. When the characters have effectively become his “friends,” then crafting story arcs comes organically. “I often feel like the characters are doing that for me! I’m hanging onto Narwhal’s tail—just along for the ride. I might give Narwhal a scenario like ‘What would happen if your tusk broke?’ And soon that story starts to play out in my brain,” says Clanton. “It doesn’t typically all go smoothly at first. I have to play with the idea a lot.”
