Toni Morrison; A look at Nobelist's writing process

Morrison, who received a standing ovation as she took the stage, is author of six major novels, Tar Baby, The Bluest Eyes, Song of Solomon, Sula, Beloved and Jazz, as well as a book of essays, Playing in the Dark. She was editor of Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality.

She discussed her work and what is required for an idea to become "bookworthy" before an audience of 1,700 that filled UB's Mainstage.

"When one spends six or seven years on a project, it must be one that cannot be easily abandoned," Morrison said.

She doesn't keep notebooks of ideas for a number of reasons, but mostly because "I don't believe I have the leisure time," she said.

"Generally, I respond to some dis-ease or dis-quiet that's connected to some troubling image, an incident or a remark or an impression...that is serious enough to keep coming back," said Morrison, who is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University.

Her writing comes from her own life, her childhood, her experiences and observations.

"I just wait for a question to surface," Morrison said.

"Occasionally a larger question poses itself. I don't write down these musings because it would give them a heft they might not deserve."

An idea must haunt her. "I need to feel pursued by the question," she said, in order for it to be "bookworthy." And when such an idea occurs, "I get out a legal pad-yellow-with a No. 2 pencil, and see what happens."

The process does not become easier with

time. Each novel is more challenging than the one that preceded it, said Morrison, who told the audience she has been writing since 1960 and published her first book in 1969.

"They all seem astonishingly more difficult each time I publish. The more I know about writing, the more difficult it becomes."

Morrison also read from a novel she currently is working on, tentatively titled Paradise, a work "which might change at any moment, but at this moment it is what it is."

Her reading centered on a wedding in a black church in which the participants grow increasingly uncomfortable with the pastor's terse message.

It also dealt with the nature of love.

"There is nothing in nature like it....If you think it's easy, you're a fool. If you think it's natural, you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive," Morrison said.

"You do not deserve love, regardless of the suffering you endured. You do not deserve love because someone did you wrong. You can only earn by practice, by careful contemplation, the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it."