According to The Writer’s Almanac, today is Toni Morrison’s birthday. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). Lorain was a steel town. Her father worked at the steel mill and in construction, and her mother raised the kids. Morrison said about her mother:

When an eviction notice was put on our house, she tore it off. If there were maggots in our flour, she wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. My mother believed something should be done about inhuman situations.

Morrison went to college, got interested in theater and traveled around in an acting troupe, then went on to get a master’s in English. She loved to read, but had never been a writer except for a few stories in high school. But after she got married and had two children, her marriage started to dissolve, and she needed an escape. She said,

It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.

She joined a writing group, but after she had workshopped her stories from high school, she was out of things to share, so she wrote a story about a black girl who wanted blue eyes. And then she started to expand it into a novel called, The Bluest Eye (1969). She went on to write eight more novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), and most recently, A Mercy (2008). And she was the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature.

Do you write secretly, compulsively, slyly? If not, I recommend it. Sometimes secrets are good, especially if there are critics nearby or you can be easily influenced. Part of the task of being a writer is to protect your new creations. Some of you may do things totally differently, but I know that if I start sharing too soon, the piece loses energy. So I don’t talk about or share anything I’m writing until I have completed an entire first draft.

Subscribe to this blog here.

“Conrad Aiken worked at a refectory table in the dining room; Robert Graves wrote in a room furnished only with objects made by hand. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up; D. H. Lawrence under a tree. William Maxwell preferred ‘small messy rooms that don’t look out on anything interesting.’ Katherine Anne Porter said she got her writing done in the country, where she lived like a hermit. Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub, Jane Austen amid family life, Marcel Proust in the confines of his bed. Balzac ate an enormous meal at five in the evening, slept till midnight, then got up and wrote at a small desk in his room for sixteen hours straight, fueled by endless cups of coffee. Toni Morrison found refuge in a motel room when her children were small; E. B. White sought it in a cabin on the shore. Due to her problem back, Penelope Lively works in an armchair, with an “ancient electronic typewriter” on her lap, while A. L. Kennedy finds comfort in a ‘monster black chair’ in a room ‘the color of blood.’”

This excerpt is from an article by Alexandra Enders in Poets and Writers entitled “The Importance of Place: Where Writers Write and Why.”

Also, here’s a collection of photographs of science fiction and fantasy writers that I stumbled upon and where they write. And for anyone interested, below is a photo of the coffee shop I frequent where I write (and edit) a lot of my prose.

Do you think it’s important where a writer writes? As a writer, do you have a favorite place where you put pen to paper or fire up the lap top? Please let me hear from you.

Subscribe to this blog here.

Comment on this post by clicking on the name of the post.