Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It is some­times the case that a favorite writer isn’t ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing when it comes to talk­ing shop.  This has nev­er been so with the self-reveal­ing Toni Mor­ri­son, whose pub­lic appear­ances and inter­views often dupli­cate the expe­ri­ence of read­ing one of her novels—her voice draws you in, and before you know it, you’re part of a world all her own that she has giv­en you the priv­i­lege of join­ing for a short time.

This is the expe­ri­ence of read­ing her inter­view with Elis­sa Schap­pell in the Paris Review. Mor­ri­son dis­cours­es on sub­jects rang­ing from her per­son­al rou­tine and his­to­ry, to her iden­ti­ty as a writer and a woman, to the larg­er his­to­ry of slav­ery and the black lives she writes about. Woven through it all are obser­va­tions about her art that may or may not be of any use to bud­ding writ­ers, but which will cer­tain­ly make lovers of Mor­ri­son read her work a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. Some of her obser­va­tions are below:

• Write when you know you’re at your best. For her, this hap­pened to be the ear­ly morn­ing, pre-dawn hours, before her chil­dren woke up, since she worked full-time and feels she is “not very bright or very wit­ty or very inven­tive after the sun goes down.” Mor­ri­son describes her morn­ing rit­u­al this way:

I always get and make a cup of cof­fee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the cof­fee and watch the light come.

• “There’s a line between revis­ing and fret­ting” It’s impor­tant for a writer to know when they are “fret­ting,” because if some­thing isn’t work­ing, “it needs to be scrapped,” although in answer to whether she goes back over pub­lished work and wish­es she had fret­ted more, Mor­ri­son answers, “a lot. Every­thing.”
• A good edi­tor is “like a priest or a psy­chi­a­trist.” Mor­ri­son worked as an edi­tor for Ran­dom House for 20 years before she pub­lished her first nov­el. She observes the rela­tion­ship between writer and edi­tor by say­ing that get­ting the wrong one means that “you are bet­ter off alone.” One of the marks of a good edi­tor? She doesn’t “love you or your work,” there­fore offers crit­i­cism, not com­pli­ments.
• Don’t write with an audi­ence in mind, write for the char­ac­ters. Know­ing how to read your own work—with the crit­i­cal dis­tance of a good reader—makes you a “bet­ter writer and edi­tor.” For Mor­ri­son, this means writ­ing not with an audi­ence in mind, but with the char­ac­ters to go to for advice, to tell you “if the ren­di­tion of their lives is authen­tic or not.”
• Con­trol your char­ac­ters. Despite the ever-present and clichéd demand to “write what you know,” Mor­ri­son stu­dious­ly tries to avoid tak­ing char­ac­ter traits from peo­ple she knows. As she puts it: “mak­ing a lit­tle life for one­self by scav­eng­ing oth­er people’s lives is a big ques­tion, and it does have moral and eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions.” And as for keep­ing con­trol of her char­ac­ters, Mor­ri­son says “They have noth­ing on their minds but them­selves and aren’t inter­est­ed in any­thing but them­selves. So you can’t let them write your book for you.”
• Plot is like melody; it does­n’t need to be com­pli­cat­ed. Mor­ri­son sums up her approach to plot in Jazz and The Bluest Eye by say­ing “I put the whole plot on the first page.” Rather than con­struct­ing intri­cate plots with hid­den twists, she prefers to think of the plot in musi­cal terms as a “melody,” where the sat­is­fac­tion lies in rec­og­niz­ing it and then hear­ing the “echoes and shades and turns and piv­ots” around it.
• Style, like jazz, involves end­less prac­tice and restraint. Speak­ing of Jazz, Mor­ri­son tells she has always thought of her­self like a jazz musi­cian, “some­one who prac­tices and prac­tices and prac­tices in order to able to invent and to make his art look effort­less and grace­ful.” A large part of her “jazz” style, she says, is “an exer­cise in restraint, in hold­ing back.”
• Be your­self, but be aware of tra­di­tion. Of the diver­si­ty of African-Amer­i­can jazz musi­cians and singers, Mor­ri­son says “I would like to write like that. I would like to write nov­els that were unmis­tak­ably mine, but nev­er­the­less fit first into African Amer­i­can tra­di­tions and sec­ond of all, this whole thing called lit­er­a­ture.”

Most read­ers of Morrison’s work would argue that’s exact­ly what she’s done her whole career. Read the entire inter­view here and be sure to vis­it the com­plete archive of Paris Review inter­views online.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Ray Brad­bury Offers 12 Essen­tial Writ­ing Tips and Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture Saves Civ­i­liza­tion

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Today is the 150th anniver­sary of the birth of the short sto­ry writer O. Hen­ry. He was born William Syd­ney Porter in Greens­boro North Car­oli­na on Sep­tem­ber 11, 1862, and his life was not easy. He chose the pen name “O. Hen­ry” while he was in the pen­i­ten­tiary.

Trained as a phar­ma­cist, Porter came down with tuber­cu­lo­sis in his ear­ly twen­ties and moved to the dri­er cli­mate of Texas, where he worked as a ranch hand, a drafts­man for the Texas Land Office, and a clerk at the First Nation­al Bank of Austin before strik­ing out on his own as a writer and launch­ing a humor mag­a­zine called The Rolling Stone. When the mag­a­zine fold­ed the fol­low­ing year, Porter took a job as a reporter, colum­nist and car­toon­ist at the Hous­ton Post. Mean­while, though, Fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors were look­ing into short­ages in Porter’s accounts from his days at the bank in Austin, and in Feb­ru­ary of 1896, when he was 33 years old and had a wife and a young daugh­ter to sup­port, Porter was arrest­ed and charged with embez­zle­ment.

While being brought to Austin for tri­al, Porter man­aged to elude his cap­tors and hop a train to New Orleans, where he arranged pas­sage on a freighter bound for Hon­duras. Despite the appear­ance of guilt Porter would always main­tain his inno­cence, say­ing that his flight from jus­tice was brought on by pan­ic. He com­pared him­self to the pro­tag­o­nist of one of Joseph Con­rad’s clas­sic nov­els, a sailor who aban­doned a ful­ly loaded pas­sen­ger ship that he thought was sink­ing. “I am like Lord Jim,” he said, “because we both made one fate­ful mis­take at the supreme cri­sis of our lives, a mis­take from which we could not recov­er.”

When Porter got to Cen­tral Amer­i­ca he began mak­ing plans for his fam­i­ly to join him there, but soon learned that his wife was dying of tuber­cu­lo­sis. He returned to Texas and was with his wife when she died. A few months lat­er he was sen­tenced to five years in a fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary in Ohio. While behind bars, Porter began writ­ing short sto­ries in earnest. To dis­guise his iden­ti­ty he used a series of pen names, even­tu­al­ly set­tling on “O. Hen­ry.”

Porter was released from prison in 1901, two years ear­ly for good behav­ior. He moved to New York to write sto­ries under his new name for mag­a­zines. From there he sky­rock­et­ed to suc­cess. Between 1904 and his death in 1910, he pub­lished some 300 sto­ries and ten books. “O. Hen­ry worked at whirl­wind speed,” writes Vic­to­ria Blake in the Barnes & Noble Clas­sics edi­tion of Select­ed Sto­ries of O. Hen­ry, “pro­duc­ing more over a short­er peri­od than any oth­er writer of his time and cul­ti­vat­ing a lit­er­ary demand unmatched by any­one, any­where in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can let­ters.”

Some of the very same ele­ments that made O. Hen­ry’s sto­ries so pop­u­lar in his lifetime–the sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, the “twist” endings–have caused them to age poor­ly since his death. A few of his sto­ries, like “The Gift of the Magi,” are still wide­ly read, but his rep­u­ta­tion has been sur­passed by more mod­ern writ­ers like Ernest Hem­ing­way, James Joyce and Sher­wood Ander­son. A lit­tle of his for­mer pres­tige is revived every year with the award­ing of the O. Hen­ry Prize for the best short fic­tion.

For his 150th birth­day we bring you what is said to be a rare record­ing of O. Hen­ry’s voice. Although the date and authen­tic­i­ty are an open ques­tion, the record­ing was appar­ent­ly made on an Edi­son cylin­der some­time between 1905 and the writer’s death in 1910. It was includ­ed in the vinyl record The Gold­en Age of Opera: Great Per­son­al­i­ties, 1888–1940. Here is a tran­script:

This is William Syd­ney Porter speak­ing, bet­ter known to you, no doubt, as O. Hen­ry. I’m going to let you in on a few of my secrets in writ­ing a short sto­ry. The most impor­tant thing, at least in my hum­ble opin­ion, is to use char­ac­ters you’ve crossed in your life­time. Truth is indeed stranger than fic­tion. All of my sto­ries are actu­al expe­ri­ences that I have come across dur­ing my trav­els. My char­ac­ters are fac­sim­i­lies of actu­al peo­ple I’ve known. Most authors spend hours, I’m told even days, labor­ing over out­lines of sto­ries that they have in their minds. But not I. In my way of think­ing that’s a waste of good time. I just sit down and let my pen­cil do the rest. Many peo­ple ask me how I man­age to get that final lit­tle twist in my sto­ries. I always tell them that the unusu­al is the ordi­nary rather than the unex­pect­ed. And if you peo­ple lis­ten­ing to me now start think­ing about your own lives, I’m sure you’ll dis­cov­er just as many odd expe­ri­ences as I’ve had. I hope this lit­tle talk will be heard long after I’m gone. I want you all to con­tin­ue read­ing my sto­ries then too. Good­bye, folks.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Stein­beck­’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer

James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plura­belle’ from Finnegans Wake

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Con­nor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’