Embedded Files
Alice Walker
Alice Walker
Alice Walker's Writing Routine:
Alice Walker's Writing Routine:
"If I’m patient, and if I don’t try to force it—and I don’t. I have no interest in forcing anything. In fact, if it doesn’t want to come, fine, I will do something else, and it can go somewhere else. So it’s very easy, actually, to wait in an attitude of patience and acceptance and trust that this is something that clearly has come to me to be expressed, and if it has gotten this far, probably it will want to come up with the form.
It’s amazing that it never seems like work. It’s hard work and then, in a way, when I look back I can’t even remember how it was done."
"This has changed a bit, but for, I would say, three decades, I wrote every morning, or I made the space. Because part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and the time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. If you are expecting someone to come to tea but you’re not going to be there, they may not come, and if I were them, I wouldn’t come. So, it’s about receptivity and being home when your guest is expected, or even when you hope that they will come."
"I wrote for such a long time in longhand that I harmed one of my fingers. It’s fine now, but I realized that it was time to move to a different way, and now I like writing on the computer. But for a long time I really did feel that thing that writers always say, that when you write in longhand, it’s as if the blood from your heart is coming into what you’re writing, right down your arm."
The Color Purple, 1982
Read Jan 2023
In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, 2005
Read May 2024
Why I Chose Alice Walker:
Why I Chose Alice Walker:
I first read The Color Purple at the University of Michigan for an English class. I knew of the novel’s critical acclaim, but I knew nothing about its content. The Color Purple follows Celie, a Black woman who has been separated from her sister and forced into an abusive marriage. The novel is epistolary, made up of letters written by Celie and addressed to God. Because of this narrative choice, Celie directly narrates the story, and speaks directly to the reader, as if she were speaking to a friend. The novel explores complex themes like racism, religion, sexuality, and forgiveness after abuse, and Celie’s story is one of perseverance and love.
Walker’s writing is always speaking about many things at once. The themes of racial and gender norms are constantly underlying the stories she’s telling in The Color Purple and her collection of short stories entitled In Love & Trouble. She has empathy for every character that she writes about, which makes her plot lines all the more complex, as everyone is a multifaceted person with their own reasons for making the decisions that they do. Because of this, her writing is still deeply relevant, and I hope to read more of her work in the future.
Passage from Alice Walker's Writing:
Passage from Alice Walker's Writing:
"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love" (Walker, The Color Purple).
Writing Data:
Writing Data:
13
13
how I felt about the quality of my writing over the course of the four days, out of a possible maximum of 20 points
738
738
average words written per day
53.25
53.25
average minutes spent writing per day
How the Experiment Went
How the Experiment Went
Alice Walker’s analogy of being ready for someone to come to tea, meaning being ready for the moments when your writing inspiration will strike, really helped me push myself to stay motivated this week. I made an effort to, each day, plan out what time/gap in my schedule I would be most able to focus on my writing, and then I committed to sitting down and writing at that moment. It felt like making an appointment, or scheduling a meeting, so I couldn’t just decide to take the day off on a whim, because the writing was sitting there, waiting for me. I also was inspired what she said about genre – lately, I’ve been questioning the content of my novel, and whether or not it will be marketable/intriguing to readers, but hearing Walker talk about how if something is coming to you, it is meant to be expressed by you for whatever reason, reminds me that I shouldn’t be writing solely to make my novel marketable. Especially during the first draft, I’m just working to make these characters and their stories come to life, and I have to trust my instincts in how that should be written.
Of the four days that I followed Walker’s routine, I typed on the computer for two of them and wrote on paper for two of them. It felt like it’d been a long time since I’d written on paper, and I found myself really drawn to that form of writing once again. I’m not sure why whenever I’ve spent a while writing on the computer, I am hesitant to return to writing on paper, when I often end up enjoying my writing so much more when it’s done by hand. This week reminded me of that, and it became clear when looking at my daily rating of my writing. The first two days I gave a 2, and the second two days I gave a 4 and a 5. I think writing on paper leaves me feeling much more fulfilled/connected to the work that I’m doing than typing, and it’s a shame that Walker had to turn to typing when she couldn’t write by hand anymore.
To the left is my data for this experiment. Over the course of the four days, I wrote 3.1 pages on my computer and 8.45 pages in my notebook. On average, I wrote 738 words per day. I worked an average of 53.25 minutes per day. Out of a maximum possible score of 20, the week got a total of 13 points. Overall, I really enjoyed the mindset shift that this writing routine gave me, and I feel as though approaching writing every day as a kind of appointment that I can’t push to the next day for no reason was good motivation to get me to produce more writing than I otherwise would have. I also was reminded of how fulfilling writing on paper can be, which will definitely influence the writing routine that I will create for myself at the end of this experiment.
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