Maya Angelou couldn't write at home, so she didn't try. She rented a plain hotel room by the month and turned it into a cell with nothing to look at. That emptiness was the whole point.

The Direct Answer
In a rented hotel room, stripped bare, lying across the bed.
She kept a room by the month wherever she lived, per her 1990 Paris Review interview.

The Rented Room

Angelou paid for a hotel room she never slept in. "I rent a hotel room for a few months," she told the Paris Review, then arrived around six-thirty each morning to work. The room held a bed, a table, and a bathroom. That was enough. She did this wherever she happened to be living, keeping a working room separate from her actual home so that walking in the door meant one thing only: time to write.

The first thing she did was empty it of anything pretty. "I have all the paintings and any decoration taken out of the room," she said. No art, no flowers, nothing on the walls. Then she gave the hotel staff a short list of rules. Empty the wastebasket and leave everything else alone. Don't change the sheets, since she never slept there. Don't touch the papers on the floor. The point was to keep the room exactly as she'd left it, frozen in mid-thought, so she could pick up where she stopped.

I have all the paintings and any decoration taken out of the room. I keep a hotel room in which I do my work, a tiny, mean room with just a bed.

Maya Angelou, The Paris Review, 1990

Why Empty Walls

The blankness worked as a defense against her own wandering attention, not an aesthetic choice. With nothing to read on the walls and nobody allowed in, the only thing in the room competing for her focus was the page in front of her. A painting is a small invitation to drift. She removed every one of them. By the time she sat down, the room had nothing left to offer her but work.

She wrote lying across the bed, propped on one elbow, for hours at a stretch. The posture left a mark. "This elbow," she said, "is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses" from the way she lay to work. It's an oddly physical detail for a job that looks so still from the outside, and it tells you how many hours she logged in that position over the years.

On the bed beside her she kept a small, fixed kit: yellow legal pads, a dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, a Bible, an ashtray, and a bottle of sherry. Every item earned its place, turning a plain rented room into a workshop she could rebuild in any town. See what each one was for, especially the Bible she read for its sound, not its scripture.

The genius of the setup is how portable and repeatable it was. A hotel room exists in every city. Strip the walls, lay out the same handful of objects, lie down in the same spot, and the working conditions are identical no matter where you are. She wasn't tied to a beloved desk or a particular view. She built the same spare cell over and over, which meant her routine never depended on being home. Wherever she went, the room came with her in the form of a checklist.

It's worth noticing what the room didn't have. No view to admire, no comfortable reading chair, no shelf of books to browse, no company. She designed out every soft escape hatch. A place that boring leaves you with very little to do except the thing you came to do, which was the entire idea behind it.

For the rest of her ritual and her daily hours, read the full Maya Angelou writing routine.

What You Can Steal