Toni Morrison on Finding Time to Write

I saw the following on Toni Morrison’s Facebook page. She’s explaining where she finds time to write.

“Very, very early in the morning, before they got up. I’m not very good at night. I don’t generate much. But I’m a very early riser, so I did that, and I did it on weekends. In the summers, the kids would go to my parents in Ohio, where my sister lives – my whole family lives out there — so the whole summer was devoted to writing.

“And that’s how I got it done. It seems a little frenetic now, but when I think about the lives normal women live — of doing several things — it’s the same. They do anything that they can. They organize it. And you learn how to use time. You don’t have to learn how to wash the dishes every time you do that. You already know how to do that. So, while you’re doing that, you’re thinking. You know, it doesn’t take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, where you can’t do anything anyway. Well, you can read the paper, but you’re sort of in there.

“And then I would think about, well, would she do this? And then sometimes I’d really get something good. By the time I’d arrived at work, I would jot it down so I wouldn’t forget. It was a very strong interior life that I developed for the characters, and for myself, because something was always churning. There was no blank time. I don’t have to do that anymore. But still, I’m involved in a lot of things, I mean, I don’t go out very much.”

She is one of the writers I would highly and quite seriously recommend for all those you want to be writers themselves one day.

Beloved, especially, is an amazingly powerful novel, not easy to read. Both the style of the book and the subject matter make it a difficult, but necessary, book.

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