P.S. Toni Morrison's Beloved Drafts
"The point is so that it doesn’t look like it’s sweating like that effort, you see? It must appear effortless!"
Here’s something I’ve learned from studying notes: great writing looks easy, but it is incredibly difficult. Toni Morrison never shows her work. To use her metaphor, the seams don’t show. Her novels are so well-crafted, it feels as though she just sat down at her desk and began writing, emerging a few hours later with Beloved.
Of course, that’s not the case. On Monday, we saw her deep research into Beloved’s historical moment and the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For this postscript, let’s look at the work that followed: how Toni combed through draft after draft to produce Beloved.
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