Still Writing

A fantastic evening just floated to me on a soft summer breeze. Thanks to Nancy, my wonderful friend and writing group buddy, I had the pleasure of attending a reading by Toni Morrison. A triple threat, she’s won a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In her eighties, Toni is frail, but feisty. And she’s still writing!

Playing to a packed, enthusiastic audience, the author of Beloved read several long, lithesome passages from a work in progress. Looking over a sheaf of pages before she began, she commented: “Some of this is so-o-o good and some of it needs editing.” She added that reading aloud to an audience “gives me something I can’t get in any other way.”

In a brief Q&A session, Toni covered a lot of territory: She talked about her view of writing as “bearing witness” and the importance of the “engagement between the author, book, and reader so the reader also bears witness. It’s the surrender of the reader to the text that makes this a shared experience,” she added.

“I can’t teach vision,” Toni observed. “That leap into language is so personal, so different” for each person that you can’t teach it, you can only recognize it.’

A few tips on process: “If you don’t like to revise, you don’t like to write. Revision is writing,” Toni writes by hand on legal pads (love that, so do I!) because she likes the idea of being able to cross out, make arrows, and move things around. When you write this way, “language is becoming,” she noted; in contrast, when you write using a computer, everything looks neat, tidy, fixed, and complete even the first time around, which may discourage revision.

And finally, Toni isn’t overly fond of the classic image of the artist: alone, preferably poverty stricken, in a garret. While teaching at Princeton, she encouraged collaboration among writing students and artists in a variety of disciplines. Wonderful idea. Wonderful evening. Thanks, Nancy!

About karinwritesdangerously

I am a writer and this is a motivational blog designed to help both writers and aspiring writers to push to the next level. Key themes are peak performance, passion, overcoming writing roadblocks, juicing up your creativity, and the joys of writing.
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4 Responses to Still Writing

  1. junebug65 says:

    How cool, seeing Toni Morrison. Thanks for sharing about it. I love her phrase “the leap into language is so personal.” I also like her thought that “If you don’t like to revise, you don’t like to write.” Interesting.

    • Hi June,

      Thanks so much for your note. You’re right, seeing Toni Morrison was really fun — and hearing her musings on writing was very inspiring. I really loved her comment on revising myself — it’s so true. Revising and writing really do go hand in hand.

      Write on! Karin

  2. Mike Tully says:

    Revision IS writing. I love it.

    • Hi Coach Tully,

      Thanks so much for checking in! I love that line, too. I especially like that Toni didn’t say the reverse: writing is revision. Her take is so much stronger. A great reminder for us all.

      Write on! Karin

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