Part 2: Writing Time
“I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles: If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.”
By the mid-1970s, Toni Morrison had established herself as a highly sought-after editor at Random House, where she worked with authors like Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Gayl Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Meanwhile she also began work on her second and third novels, Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977). Balancing editorial responsibilities with writing often meant that she had to write when and where she could. When a 1993 interviewer asked her how she found the time to write in those years, Morrison explained that the demands of a full-time job and full-time motherhood meant writing took shape in interstitial spaces and unconventional locations: “I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationery, in automobiles: If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.”
Towards the end of 1973 Morrison began writing in day planners, often filling multiple ones from the very same year with meditations, outlines, everyday tasks, and the only surviving drafts of her 1977 novel Song of Solomon. “Writing Time” brings together pages from three different diaries from 1974 and 1975. Together, these pages clarify Morrison’s writing practice long before she had the career space or schedule of a full-time novelist. More complexly, they remind us that time in Morrison’s writing, and the time she spent writing, is recursive, iterative, and multivalent.
Diaries
1975
Princeton University Library Special Collections
On Christmas Day of 1993, a fire ravaged Toni Morrison’s Hudson Valley, New York home, burning documents from the early part of her career. While work for the middle and late novels wasn’t badly damaged, personal and professional documents from the first part of her career were either lost or partially destroyed. These diaries’ singed borders bear the trace of the 1993 fire. Scorched and delicate, these pages reveal the tension between the presumed stability of an archival object and its fragility.
Diaries
1974-1975
Princeton University Library Special Collections
As of 2021, no drafts, notes, or galleys relating to Song of Solomon were believed to have survived the 1993 Hudson Valley, New York house fire. Preparation for this exhibition unearthed outlines, drafts, and reflections on Song of Solomon, its cast of characters, and its possible narrative directions. The pages in this case highlight selections from the diaries where we see Morrison drafting prose passages for Song of Solomon, many of which made it into the published version of the novel.
Included selections from Morrison's 1975 Diary (See Full Finding Aid Record)
- Two-page outline for Song of Solomon
- One page of notes for Song of Solomon
- Outline for Song of Solomon’s opening scenes and outline of Milkman Dead’s character development
- Three-page outline for Song of Solomon
- Two pages of drafts for Song of Solomon, Chapter 1
- Morrison’s reflections on Milkman Dead, Song of Solomon’s protagonist, and his “voice.”
- One page of dialogue between Lena, First Corinthians, and Macon Dead, three of Song of Solomon’s key characters.
- Two pages of drafts and notes showing Morrison working through plotlines for the later part of Song of Solomon.
- Three pages of drafts for Song of Solomon, Chapter 2.
- Two pages of drafts for Song of Solomon, Chapter 1.
- Outline detailing the history of Song of Solomon’s key characters and signal scenes, including Guitar’s father’s funeral, Guitar and Milkman’s episode in jail, and Hagar’s “shopping.”
- Two pages of drafts for Song of Solomon.
- Draft of dialogue between Milkman Dead and his friend, Guitar, for Song of Solomon, Chapter 3.
- Draft of conversation concerning the origin of Milkman Dead’s name.
- Morrison’s reflections on Milkman Dead and her desire to capture his “twofold” point of view.
