Toni Morrison Says…
I read an online interview with Toni Morrison in Time. Morrison is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author…but you know that. Heck, the woman has won about a billion writing awards. My favorite of hers is BELOVED. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times. I think I kept hoping it would be less heart-wrenching on subsequent reads. It wasn’t.
Morrison was asked 10 questions. Her answers were interesting. I like what she says about why she started writing:
My deepest passion was reading. At some point—not early, I was 35 or 36—I realized there was a book that I wanted very much to read that really hadn’t been written, and so I sort of played around with it in trying to construct the kind of book I wanted to read.
Notice how she did not start writing for glory, money, fame or to hit bestseller lists. Just saying.
Her advice for aspiring writers goes like this:
The work is in the work itself. If she writes a lot, that’s good. If she revises a lot, that’s even better. She should not only write about what she knows but about what she doesn’t know. It extends the imagination.
Now, that advice won’t get you published, but it provides a good direction to getting started. My sense is that her underlying point is: just write and keep writing.
