Morrison edited other people's manuscripts for a living, which makes her own drafting tools an odd detail: the woman who spent her days around Random House's typewriters and later its computers wrote her own books the slowest way available to her.
Pencil First, Always
Morrison's preference was specific down to the brand. A Dixon Ticonderoga number two, soft lead, on a yellow legal pad. She chose a pencil over a fountain pen or a ballpoint, the kind associated more with schoolwork than literary fiction. The choice wasn't sentimental. A pencil is forgiving in a way ink isn't. You can change your mind mid-sentence without the page turning into a mess of crossed-out lines.
This was true across her whole career, not just her early books written before home computers were common. In later interviews, well after Beloved and her Nobel Prize, she confirmed she was still starting every project the same way: longhand, on a pad, with a pencil in her hand rather than a keyboard under her fingers.
The Computer Comes in Second, Not First
The typing stage came after the drafting, once a section existed on paper, functioning as much as a first revision as a transcription.
Now I use both. I always write longhand on a yellow tablet with a pencil, and I scratch and change. I do that also, but that is much later when everything is put together. I type that into a computer and then I begin to revise.
Toni Morrison, The Paris Review, 1993
Notice the order. The computer shows up much later, after the handwritten material already exists. That sequencing matters. Morrison composed on paper, not at a keyboard, and used the act of typing as the first real pass at revision, a moment where every sentence had to survive being retyped before it earned a place in the next draft. She's also described revising individual passages as many as a dozen or more times before she was satisfied, all of it happening after the pencil stage was done.
For the wider picture of when and where she wrote, see the full Toni Morrison writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Draft in whatever medium is easiest to change. Pencil on paper let Morrison revise mid-sentence without friction.
- Use transcription as a first edit. Retyping a handwritten draft is a natural place to catch what isn't working.
- Keep the same method even after success changes your options. Morrison could have afforded any tool. She kept the pencil.
- Separate composing from cleaning up. Two distinct stages, on paper and then on screen, gave each one a clearer job.