Toni Morrison On The Fork In The Road All Writers Eventually Come To

She wasn't just a killer writer who won the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize. She also taught writing and this was her pet peeve.

Every Toni Morrison novel I read gutted me. Don’t think that woman knew any other way to write, except using words like hooks to rip your guts out. What she did with words goes a long way to explaining the 30 literary awards she won, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But Morrison didn’t just write, she taught writing. She was a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton for 17 years. After she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she did an PBS interview. Shared the advice she taught students in her class.

There’s a fork in the road, when it comes to writing. And every writer is going to come to that fork at some point. Which is why she spent her whole life telling writers the same thing, over and over. And I want to talk about it. But first? Have a look.

Maybe I can show, too, not just tell…

—

i want you back, my friend,
your laugh:

i miss your laugh.
it was a balm.
a rose, a nut
i have squirreled away
all these years,
these long, long and long
years.

i call you back, old friend,
your heart:

naked,
your naked heart,
it is naked against this sort of cold;
i have a feather coat for you, my friend,
please take it. you are
cold.

That’s by John Hampton in a piece called whippoorwills unite in a fever. Written in memory of a loved one lost to cancer. Undid me, and I hope you’ll go read it.

—

Two of my clients sell coffee but they’re no competition to each other. One is ridiculously expensive. $100 a pound. Comes from a teeny bit of land where supply is finite and they can’t get machines in to harvest like most coffee. So they climb an active volcano. Pick it by hand, carry it down on a donkey’s back and I’m not joking. The price lets the farmers grow coffee instead of cocaine and I’m not kidding on that either. People who can afford it? Happy to pay. It’s that good.

The other client? Run of the mill. Ten bucks a pound. Here’s the joke. All those people buying ten buck coffee would be outraged at the idea of $100 coffee but think nothing of going to Starbucks, pay five bucks for a Cappuccino, Frappuccino, whatever the hell they order. No idea that if they weighed the beans in their cup of Starbucks, the $100/pound coffee is actually cheaper. lol.

Point is, humans aren’t logical. We like to think we are. But we’re not. We decide based on emotion and justify with logic. Of course, we’re not talking about coffee, we’re talking about words, right? Humor me, maybe I can rattle your bones a little.

—

Here’s one by Maria Nazos, in a piece called Woman to Woman. Two women in a bar. Go read it, you’ll understand why a 2 minute read has well over 4,000 claps.

At the Old Colony Tap, she and I are having one of those
uneasy talks that women have when no one else
will listen. Her ex, who is my ex, is in jail
pacing past bars until he is released

for the umpteenth time, while we inhale
cigarette after cigarette over the subject of him,
though I’m still trying to stub out my past
that’s smoldering behind me.

—

Some people? What they’re writing is art. Picasso. Rembrandt. But with words. And maybe it’s not quite there yet. But it’s what they’re striving for.

Other people? Finger painting by comparison. Nothing wrong with finger painting. But it’s not art. Paint. Paper. All they have in common.

Same with words. Some words are art. Other words, all they have in common is letters on a screen. That’s it. All there is in common.

Here’s what Toni Morrison harped on. People who write for the bottomed-out mind. What she meant by that is people who don’t want to think too hard.

People who like to lump other people in groups by one shared trait. Brown people taking our jobs. All men are this. All woman are that. Rotten republicans or damn democrats. Lump people together in groups. No nuance, no humanity.

She had more contempt for the writer fueling the bottomed out mind than the reader. Said people who write that way have a real problem, at least in her opinion. Don’t you fuel the bottomed out mind. That’s what she told her students.

—

“It hit me on a Tuesday afternoon, a revelation as banal as it was profound: the world had become a labyrinth of simulations, a hall of mirrors where reality was nothing more than a flickering shadow on the wall… ”

That’s from a piece called The Perpetual State of Becoming, by Ani Eldritch, a young Gen Z writer, talking about the world we live in. She is young, crazy talented, and she sees the world clearly, how full of pretense we are while we imitate everyone else. Doesn’t even have a thousand followers, but it’s damn fine writing. She is not playing to the bottomed out mind. Reading it? Elevates understanding. Opens our eyes, makes us look at ourselves. That’s why I nominated it. Why it got boosted, too.

Toni Morrison believed that good writing elevates us. I think I have to agree.

Robert Frost wrote a lovely poem about the path less taken. There’s a fork in the road all writers come to, too. It’s the precise moment you realize there’s money to be had pushing buttons. Money and hate. Easiest buttons to push. Make you money pretty reliably. And once you know that, you’re staring at the fork in the road.

Beauty and art? That’s the path less taken. Look in the feeds. Tell me I’m wrong.

Here’s the perfect one to finish with…

—

When I am my best self, everything matters to me. When I am at my most loving, I find meaning in everything. I am an emotional man. What I really mean by this is I am moved. Sometimes I feel like a leaf on the waters of a rushing river, affected by the whole world, thrust in all directions. Sometimes I sit to my kitchen table at five am with feelings I won’t have time for later.

From Silhouettes by Roman Newell. Talks about the different parts of us. Because we all have them. The part of us that can dive into the hole with the worst of us. Or rise above it, be our best selves. I, too, have felt like a leaf on the waters of a rushing river.

Freedom of choice is a glorious thing. We can push buttons or we can make art. And I don’t care which you do. Far be it for me to criticize how any writer pays their bills.

But if you don’t want to? Don’t be swayed by what you see in the feeds or the claims of someone getting clicks because they push pain buttons. No matter what you write, there are people out there looking for you. Don’t ever compromise.

Happy writing.

xo
Linda

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