Maya Angelou's writing routine might be the most specific one in the entire archive. She didn't write at home. She rented a hotel room, usually at a small local hotel near whatever city she was living in, and she went there every morning at roughly six-thirty with a particular set of objects she brought with her every day. A yellow legal pad. A Bible. A thesaurus. A deck of cards. A bottle of sherry. An ashtray. And a request, which she made a condition of the rental, that the hotel management strip everything off the walls of the room before she arrived. No paintings. No decorations. Nothing for the eye to rest on except the blank plaster. Then she worked until about two in the afternoon, went home, cleaned up, cooked, and read over what she'd done in the evening.
She described this routine in her 1990 Paris Review Art of Fiction interview with George Plimpton, and anyone who writes seriously should read that interview at least once. It's one of the clearest accounts of a working practice ever given by a major American writer, and the specifics of it are worth studying because they're unusually engineered. Angelou wasn't guessing. She'd figured out exactly what conditions her writing mind needed, and she'd reverse-engineered a daily ritual to produce those conditions on demand.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- Around 5:30 in the morning. She had coffee with her husband, then drove or was driven to the hotel by 6:30. The early start was deliberate, partly because the mornings were her best hours and partly because she wanted to be inside the room before the day's obligations could find her.
- Writing Location
- A small rented hotel room, kept on a monthly rental arrangement, in whatever city she was living in at the time. She never wrote the books at home. The hotel room was the office, and home was the place she returned to in the afternoon.
- Daily Output
- Seven or eight hours of writing, roughly 6:30 AM until 2 PM. She didn't talk about a word count. The measure was time. If the writing came, she wrote. If it didn't, she sat in the room and waited until it did.
- Tools
- Yellow legal pads, a Bible, Roget's Thesaurus, a deck of cards for solitaire, a bottle of sherry, and an ashtray. Later in life the sherry became optional. The legal pads and the Bible never did.
- Famous Ritual
- The blank walls. She made the hotel strip the room of all decoration before she started the rental, and she kept it that way. Nothing hanging anywhere. The room was a box and she needed it to stay a box.
- Books Written This Way
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, the rest of the autobiographical series, and her poetry collections.
The Hotel Room
The hotel room is the part of Angelou's routine that most writers find strange the first time they hear about it, and that quickly starts to make sense once they think about it for a minute. She was asked in the Paris Review interview why she didn't write at home, and her answer was practical. At home there were people she loved and who loved her back. The phone rang. There were meals to think about, laundry to fold, friends who might drop by. Every one of these was a real and reasonable demand on her attention, and any one of them could ruin a morning's writing without anyone meaning to. The hotel room solved the problem by putting her in a space where none of those demands could reach her.
The cost was one she could afford by the time she was writing Caged Bird in 1969. She rented the room by the month and kept it indefinitely, moving the arrangement to a new hotel whenever she changed cities. The staff understood she wasn't a guest. She'd arrive before breakfast, she'd leave in the afternoon, and she didn't want room service or fresh towels during the working hours. What she needed from the hotel was a door that locked, a bed she wouldn't use, a desk or table she would, and the absence of her entire regular life for the eight hours she was inside.
The genius of the setup is that it inverts the standard writing-advice about creating a dedicated home office. A home office is a room inside the house, and the house is full of the rest of your life. A rented hotel room is the opposite. It's a room inside a building full of strangers, none of whom know you or want anything from you, which means the only content in the room is the content you brought with you. Angelou had figured out that the material around her while she worked had to be as empty as possible so that the material inside her head could show up and take its place. The hotel room was the cleanest version of that she could find.
The Yellow Legal Pads
The tools she brought were not arbitrary. Each one had a specific job, and together they functioned as a kind of portable writing kit she could deploy in any rented room she happened to be working in that year. The yellow legal pads were the drafting surface. She wrote longhand, in ink, because she'd found that the slower pace of handwriting kept her prose honest in a way typing didn't. The Bible was there for rhythm. She'd grown up in a Black Baptist church in Stamps, Arkansas, and the King James cadences were embedded in her ear before she knew what a sentence was. When she needed to hear a beat, she opened the Bible and read a few verses aloud and the beat came back.
The Roget's Thesaurus was practical. When a word wasn't doing its job, she looked for a better one. The deck of cards is the strangest-looking piece of the kit until you understand what it's for. She played solitaire. Not for entertainment, not on breaks, but while the writing was happening. Her description, in the Plimpton interview, is that solitaire occupied her conscious mind just enough to get it out of the way so her unconscious could do the work. The dealing of the cards was a rhythm she could hold with her hands while her head wandered around looking for a sentence. When the sentence showed up she'd put the cards down, write it, then pick the cards up again.
This is one of the best pieces of practical writing advice I've ever come across, and it's something I've borrowed from her directly. A small, repetitive, thoughtless task running in the background of your working session can actually produce more writing than pure concentration will, because it gives your conscious mind somewhere to park itself. Knitting works. Doodling works. Walking around a room works. Angelou used cards because cards were portable and quiet and she could do them one-handed. Whatever your version of the cards is, it belongs in your writing kit.
Solitaire
The cards deserve their own section because the principle underneath them is bigger than the cards themselves. Angelou's theory, as far as I can reconstruct it from her interviews, was that the part of the mind that produces sentences is not the same part that manages the writing session. The producing part is older, more intuitive, and easily scared off. The managing part is the part that checks the clock, worries about the deadline, rereads what you just wrote, and wonders whether it's any good. If you let the managing part run the session, the producing part will go quiet, because it doesn't like being watched.
Solitaire was Angelou's method of keeping the managing part busy while the producing part did its work. The cards are just complicated enough to hold conscious attention and just simple enough that no real thought is required. You deal, you move cards around, you notice patterns, you reshuffle. Meanwhile, somewhere else in your head, sentences are assembling themselves. When one is ready, it surfaces, and you catch it on the yellow pad. Then you go back to the cards until the next sentence is ready. The hours pass quickly because you're always half-occupied, and at the end of the session you have a stack of pages you don't quite remember producing.
I know writers who have never heard of Angelou's routine and who have independently discovered the same trick with doodling, with knitting, with pacing a room. The trick is almost universal among people who've been writing seriously for decades. The surface activity doesn't matter. What matters is that the managing part of your mind has something small and harmless to chew on so that the producing part can work without being interrupted. Angelou was the first major writer I know of to describe the mechanism openly, and the description is worth the price of the Paris Review interview by itself.