Toni Morrison: “The Best Part of It All … Is Finishing It and Doing It Over”

Toni Morrison (Nobel ’93) described how, for her, writing is a process of self-editing and rewriting.

This is from “The Site of Memory,” which appeared in the 1995 (second) edition of Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser (pp. 83-102). Here’s Morrison:

By now I know how to get to that place where something is working. I didn’t always know; I thought every thought I had was interesting — because it was mine. Now I know better how to throw away things that are not useful. …

When you first start writing – and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers – you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter, another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it — and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember. I’m a little more sanguine about it now. Because the best part of it all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over. That’s the thrill of a lifetime for me: if I can just get done with that first phase and then have infinite time to fix it and change it. I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I never touched it, and that takes a lot of time and a lot of sweat.