Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winner Toni Morrison, in Washington to receive the Library of Congress' 2011 National Book Festival Award for Creative Achievement, and to appear at the 11th annual National Book Festival on the Mall, gave this advice about writing:
- "I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life -- is there nothing larger? More important?"
- How to treat the dreaded writer's block -- "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come."
- Creating art, whether writing, dancing, music, or theater, "isn't a playground. It's serious work. Art really is a life and death situation."
- "When I write, I expect the reader to be there with me as a participant -- the reader is not in the distance."
- Read and become a storyteller. "I lived my life thinking I was a reader. Ever since I was three years old, I've been reading -- a revered activity." As children, "we had to learn how to tell stories to entertain adults."
"My life is either reading books, teaching books, editing books, or writing books -- that's all I know. I don't ski," she told a rapt audience at the Hay Adams Hotel's Author Series 9/23.
Morrison studied writing at DC's Howard University in the 1940s, and later taught there. She earned a Master of Arts degree at Cornell University, later taught creative writing at Yale, and then at Princeton University, until retiring last year.
As an editor at Random House in the 1960s, "I was looking for the young black women who were sort of erased since the 1920s." She worked on books with Angela Davis, Gail Jones, among other noted authors.
But not all were women. "Ali was handed to me ... great duress", she noted about "the greatest".
She wrote her first book, "The Bluest Eye", while working at Random House and rearing children. "Young black girls were jokes, theatrical sidelines. No one took them seriously."
The African-American 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove in "The Bluest Eye" is convinced that God does not exist because her prayer for blue eyes is not granted. "Who pushed such self-loathing on that child?" Morrison asked rhetorically. It took her five years to complete "that little book" she had begun in 1962.
Morrison has just completed "Home", which will be out in May. "It takes place in the 1950s, my time. I thought I knew about the fifties. I knew nothing."
And that is another lesson for writers.
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