The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,109
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. I can stand around and do other things and think about it at the same time. I don’t mind not writing every minute; I’m not so terrified.
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.
Q. In Song of Solomon, what was the relationship between your memories and what you made up? Was it very tenuous?
A. Yes, it was tenuous. For the first time I was writing a book in which the central stage was occupied by men, and that had something to do with my loss, or my perception of loss, of a man (my father) and the world that disappeared with him. (It didn’t, but I felt that it did.) So I was re-creating a time period that was his—not biographically his life or anything in it; I use whatever’s around. But it seemed to me that there was this big void after he died, and I filled it with a book that was about men because my two previous books had had women as the central characters. So in that sense it was about my memories and the need to invent. I had to do something. I was in such a rage because my father was dead. The connections between us were threads that I either mined for a lot of strength or they were purely invention. But I created a male world and inhabited it and it had this quest—a journey from stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a complete man. It was my way of exploring all that, of trying to figure out what he may have known.
God’s Language
PART OF THIS ESSAY is a substitute for an entry or series of entries in a journal or notebook that I have never kept. The kind of writer’s journal, many of which I have read, which contains ideas for future work, sketches of scenes, observations and meditations. But especially the thoughts that undergird problems and solutions the writer encounters during a work in progress.
I don’t keep such notebooks for a number of reasons, one of which is the leisure time unavailable to me, the other is the form my meditations take. Generally it is a response to some tangled, seemingly impenetrable dis-ease; an unquietness connected to a troubling image. (The images may be something seen in the material world or they might not be.) Other times I circle around an incident, a remark, or an impression that is peculiar enough to first provoke curiosity, then mysterious enough to keep recurring. With The Bluest Eye it was an exchange I had as a child with a friend that worried me on and off for years. In Sula it was a, to me, contradictory response my mother and her friends had to a woman in town. Another was a powerfully imagistic piece of male mythology inapplicable to women and dismissive of the consequences of the truth of that myth on women. In burrowing into those images or remarks or impressions questions surface: Suppose my childhood friend got what she prayed for? What were my mother’s friends appreciating while they were disapproving? What was the real trick of the Tar Baby? Why was Margaret Garner so completely without