Maya Angelou's Drafts

"You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."

Mar 03, 2025

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) believed that words are things. That they have the ability to act in the world—to heal us, to hurt us. If, during one of her festive parties, she heard a racial slur in her home, she would kindly escort the speaker to the door. “Not in my house,” she’d say. Hate-filled words toward any group of people, she thought, were poison.1

From an early age, Angelou learned that words have power. As a seven-year-old child, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After she told her brother, the boyfriend turned up dead. Though tiny, Maya Angelou realized that her words had the power to kill a man. She refused to speak for the next five years.

Poetry enticed Angelou to speak again. A teacher, noticing her love of literature, told her that if she really loved poetry, she would speak it. And once she started speaking again, she never stopped. Her voice is powerful, mellifluous, and grounded; it is remarkable to think that she went so long without using it.

Words are things, and so Angelou used language to spread love and empowerment. I can’t help but include a clip of her reading her poem “And Still I Rise” before we launch into her notes.

Best known today as a writer, Maya Angelou was many things throughout her life. She was an actress, a singer, a mother, and a civil rights leader. She worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and starred in Roots. Bill Clinton asked her to write a poem for his inauguration.

Her illustrious writing career began with the first in a series of memoirs, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings —a book that focuses on her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. And, it is with her notes for this book, that we begin.

Angelou’s Notes for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Many brilliant writers find writing difficult. Persistence and the ability to sit with discomfort is the distinguishing characteristic of greatness. Angelou was one such writer. She confessed,

I know that there are writers who say that it’s very easy for them, and I’m glad for them…But it isn’t easy for me.

Maybe she’d hit on a glorious couple of weeks when the writing flowed and she didn’t need to revise anything. But that happens rarely.

….The rest of the time, it’s plodding. It’s going back and taking out extraneous words, it’s rethinking phrases, trying to make it simpler, trying to make it beautiful, trying to make the language sing.2

As a testament to the challenges Angelou faced when writing, she set up a remarkably disciplined routine.

I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.3

The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center now houses Angelou’s notes and drafts that accompanied her writing process.

Some of Angelou’s notes for *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*, Schomburg Center NYPL

Angelou’s efforts are preserved in the many drafts of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) that she left behind. Here we find her reworking phrases and reordering sequences under the memoir’s original title, “Just Let Me Know the Rules of the Game.”

Editing takes many forms. For some, it’s a matter of amplification and expansion. For Angelou it was a matter of whittling down her manuscript to its most powerful form. Her drafts show her erasing lines to clarify her message. Consider, for example, the following pages that correspond with Chapter 2 in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou ultimately cut the first line, which stayed with me long after reading her papers.

Being seven in Stamps was being on speaking terms with slavery. ~~There was no freedom of youth allowed by Grandmother Henderson and Uncle Willie.~~ When my brother was six and I a year younger, we were used to rattle off the times tables as I was later to see Chinese children in S.F. use the abacus.

The final version of Chapter 2 begins with “When my brother was six…”

Cut-Up Editing

Angelou began writing her memoir on yellow legal pads. As she revised her work she’d cut up handwritten pages and affix them together with small nails.

Once on typed pages, she’d cut her drafts up further and number sections she thought should go together. Then she’d combine her cuttings with tape.

Along the way, Angelou zoomed out to note what she aimed to accomplish in certain sections of the book with a “perspectus.” Here she outlined the story’s beginning:

P.p. 1-50
deal with
next 5 years in Arkansas
Mute acceptance or rejection on events occurring around store school & church.
Characters outside immediate family come alive…

She also created to-do lists, directing herself to

Decide on placement of pp. 4-6

Angelou’s Poetry Scraps

Angelou had a kind of explosive creativity to her—and her poetry ended up on all sorts of random scraps of paper: from the back of envelopes to Delta Airline’s notepads.

She once said

You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.4

And her many poetic scribbles suggest the same message. She also scribbled some of her verses in notebooks like this one:

I found this poem particularly powerful:

My Balzac died at 7 mths
His Mother was a wet nurse
My Dante jumped from a slave ship
(The stench was worse than chains or nearly)
My Madame Curie, spent her years creating delectable dishes over iron stoves—

Angelou even scribbled verses in the backs of books, like in her copy of Thomas Merton on St. Bernard. When inspiration struck (and it struck Angelou quite often), she recorded her ideas on whatever paper was available.

Now, after Angelou’s death, these drafts and scraps of verse feel even more precious because they contain many more words than she shared in her published work. In addition to giving us more of her writing, Angelou’s notes show us just how hard she worked to become the celebrated author we know and love.

Notes on Angelou’s Notes

Cut up your work: Now that many of us write on computers, we lose the tactility of moving sections around. So, you might want to print out your drafts and cut them up in order to paste them together in a new order. You might even try using nails as Angelou did. It turns writing into a kind of jigsaw puzzle.

Write a lot: Angelou seemed to have a constant stream of words flowing from her. And from that pile of words, she picked out the best to share with us.

Writing is hard work: It was difficult for Maya Angelou—one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century. So if writing feels difficult for you too, then join the club! It’s filled with some very illustrious people. Success is not always a matter of talent, as much as it is a matter of sticking with something though the difficulty.

Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.