There’s no doubt Toni Morrison is a gifted writer. My first introduction to her talent was Beloved. Challenging in its style and confronting in its content, it has stayed with me to this day as a living entity much as Beloved stayed to haunt her mother.
Typical of many writers, I’m curious about the writing habits and workings of successful authors, or authors whom I admire. It’s not so much
their writing hints and tips – I need to keep writing to develop my own hints and tips that work for me – but about how they view and conduct the writing craft.
I stumbled upon an article by Josh Jones about an interview with Morrison in the Paris Review and was not entirely surprised to find that she talks about her writing in the same way she writes. This was no prosaic ‘write what you know’ or ‘show don’t tell’.
1. Write when you know you’re at your best.
She’s even evocative when she’s talking about her best time to write:
I always get and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark – it must be dark – and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come.
I’ve discovered that I, too, write best in the morning. Not quite so early as Morrison, though! I’ve found during my years as a writer in the corporate world that the last couple of hours before clocking off are a right-off. (Write off?) My brain is sludge, the excitement of the new day has waned and I’m emotionally winding down.
But I, too, need that cup of coffee as soon as I put my bum in the seat (or turn the computer on if my desk is in standing mode) to get all sorts of juices flowing. Metaphorically.
2. “There’s a line between revising and fretting.”
I’ve never really thought about it before, but that line is an important one to recognise. I’ve sadly edited the life out of a few of my short stories. They’ve become just words on a page, not a way into another living, breathing world.
3. A good editor is “like a priest or a psychiatrist”.
I’m struggling to completely understand this one as I’ve never worked with an editor, let alone a good one. But I love the boldness of these similes. It’s a big call to compare an editor to a kind of ultimate confessor. Does that mean she views her writing as a confession? That in writing she is not simply creating characters and plot but purging her innermost secrets or self?
4. Don’t write with an audience in mind, write for the characters.
By this she means go to the characters for advice about “if the rendition of their lives is authentic or not”. I struggle a little with this as my day job is all about writing for the target audience. But from now on I will check with the characters about the authenticity of my writing.
5. Control your characters.
But on the other hand, she also says that the characters “have nothing on their minds but themselves and aren’t interested in anything but themselves. So you can’t let them write your book for you”.
Another fine line, it seems.
6. Plot is like melody; it doesn’t need to be complicated.
I love this one!! Yes!!! I would never have thought about plot in this way, but it’s true of any good story. You should be able to hear the “echoes and shades and turns and pivots” around the plot just as you can in music.
7. Style, like jazz, involves endless practice and restraint.
The standard tip is ‘a writer writes’, meaning a writer only improves when they practice their craft, just like anything in life. ‘Practice makes perfect’ and all that. But the way Morrison describes her writing is like a jazz musician, “someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful”. And a large part of her “jazz” style, she says, is “an exercise in restraint, in holding back”.
8. Be yourself, but be aware of tradition.
I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.
An amazing writer.
