Write the Book You Want to Read
Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Toni did not think about being a writer as a kid. “I wanted to be a reader,” she said. “I thought everything that needed to be written had already been written or would be.”
Born to a family of highly talented musicians in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Toni was originally named Chloe Ardelia Wofford. She received a Christian middle name of Anthony at her baptism while she was twelve, and her family shortened it and started to call her Toni.
While teaching English Literature at Howard University, Toni married a Jamaican architect in 1958. They had their first son three years later, but their marriage was short-lived. Toni was pregnant with their son when the couple separated in 1964.
After her second son's divorce and birth, Toni began a new chapter with her children in New York, working as an editor for the publisher Random House. As the first black woman senior editor in the fiction department, she read, edited, and critiqued books. For many years, she hoped to read a novel centered around society’s most vulnerable people—women, children, and Black people—but none had passed through her desk.
At age 34, Toni started writing the book she wanted to read. Finding time with a demanding 9-to-5 job and duty for two children as a single parent was difficult. The experience reminded her of her grandmother, who had fled the South with seven children and no means of support. She tried to write after work, but concentrating wasn’t easy. Early morning was the only available time.
A ritual slowly took shape: Toni would rise at 4 or 5 a.m., ensuring not to disturb her children with the alarm. She would move in the dark, savoring her first cup of coffee as she looked forward to dawn. “Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process,” she once said. “For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light. It’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”
For a limited window of time before her day job, she put away all other life concerns and sat at her desk. Toni wrote her initial drafts with No. 2 Pencils, switching to a typewriter only in the final stage of the process. “I don’t trust my writing that is not written,” she later reflected in an interview. “…although I work very hard in subsequent revisions to remove the writerly-ness from it, to give it a combination of lyrical, standard, and colloquial language.” As the sun rose, soft morning light filled the room, where she sat and wrote what would later become her first book, The Bluest Eyes, published five years later in 1970.
Toni kept her writing project a secret from her colleagues even after publishing her book. In the publishing world, editors rarely become writers, especially women. “At the time, I certainly didn’t personally know any other women writers who were successful,” she said. “It looked very much like a male preserve… There were no in-house editors who wrote fiction.” Her colleagues would only discover The Bluest Eyes through a Sunday review in The New York Times Book Review.
Two years before her death, Toni wrote a New Yorker article about her experience working as a cleaner as a child. She told her dad how unhappy she was working with a demanding woman and looked for her dad’s sympathy.
“Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people,” his dad responded. “Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
Toni translated what he said in her own words:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
Toni Morrison (1931-2019), born and raised in Ohio, was an American writer and editor who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She died in August 2019 in New York City at 88.
Sources:
The Work You Do, the Person You Are, New Yorker
Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction No. 134, The Paris Review
Why Toni Morrison writes early: ‘I’m really smart in the morning.’