Author Dana A. Williams on what Toni Morrison can teach us about editing

You have to be willing to accept where she is at any given moment. There were some times when she was incredibly generous, and there were other times when she clearly had some other things that she was wanting to do. And so I had to learn: Let the story go where it will, and trust that when she says we can talk more later, you'll have that opportunity to talk more later.

The first time that we met to talk about the book in her office in Princeton, she knew [I was] working on these five Black writers. I'm working on this fiction, and she didn't talk about a single one of them. She talked about everything else and I thought, “Oh boy, I don't know how this is gonna work out.”

And then, at the end, she goes, “And if I can be helpful, let's just set up some more time. I'm glad you're working on this. You know, I really want people to understand what happened in the editorship.” And I'm thinking to myself, “Do you really? Because I asked you some pointed questions and you pointed me in different directions.”

But again, that was, I think, her subtle way of saying this isn't just about the fiction. This is the bigger conversation. So I ended up conceding, interestingly enough, that this was going to be a bigger book than what I had initially thought.

[Morrison] lets me make this small talk until ultimately she's like, “So how's it going?” And as a writer, she was gentle. I said, “Well, I'm not making as much progress as I would want to. Things are a little bit slower. But I have the title. And things are going to jell because [if] you get the title, you know where you're going.” And I say, “The House That Toni Built at Random.” … And she goes, “Eh, smart, but too long.” So now my one little celebration also seems to be devastated. And she says, “Toni at Random.” I say, “Well, I don't know. Can I call you Toni?” And she says, “Well, ‘Chloe at Random,’ no one would get it.” [Editor’s note: Chloe Wofford is Morrison’s birth name.]

The thing that ... was true for every book, no matter what, was to clarify whatever the point that you're trying to make. So if there's a theme in fiction, be sure that it's there. Be sure that all of the stories either hang together or there are no uncertainties about a character. ... So there were always clarifying questions. And then there was the post-manuscript completion moment that we don't talk about or think about enough in terms of promotion. A really good editor makes sure that the book gets in the hands of the right people, and I think she was probably better at that than most people.

When I was talking to her about it, to say, “All right, tell me, what makes a good editor?” And she said, ‘Well, the book makes a good editor. The writer makes a good editor. It's not the editor; it's the work itself. Now what I can do to make it better varies from book to book.’” 

There were some writers, like when she talked about Toni Cade Bambara, she said, “My only job with Bambara was to make sure that the story held together and that she wasn't leaving the reader behind.” She would joke about Bambara moving so fast that if the reader didn't keep up, then the reader just got lost. So sometimes it would be slowing her down, adding a sentence or two to give the reader some time to process. 

Interestingly enough, I didn't know it at the time, but I think that was a function of Morrison's work in the theater. The time that she spent at Howard that she talked about most positively was as an actor herself. And one of the techniques for playwrights is if there's a line that punches, you have to give the audience an opportunity to pause, to catch up, before you move to the next line.

The thing that she tells [Nigerian writer] Chinweizu [Ibekwe], who was the person who hung up on her, is the thing that resonates the most with me. She writes to him not to worry, that she cannot stay mad at people, only the institutions. 

Her interaction with writers and with other people in a general sense was, “We don't have to agree. If we have a similar type of motivation toward honoring the culture in some way, it's fine.  There will be disagreements, but in the end it's structures that I don't forgive, or that I can't bridge a gap.” So there was this fundamental sense that the author-editor relationship will be tested. But I appreciated that she didn't take any of it personally. 

Morrison's archives are at Princeton and I used them to fill in gaps. The Random House archives are at Columbia. I worked primarily in the Random House collection because they're filed based on who the editor was. So when I'm trying to figure out what her comments were directly on the page for Toni Cade Bambara, I would go to the Bambara manuscripts, see what the comments were. But then I also had to go to Spelman [College in Atlanta] to look at Bambara’s archive, to make sure that I wasn't missing anything, because my obsession was that there was going to be some glaring hole — some big mistake that I made that I couldn't live with myself on. 

Every archive that was available to me, I tried to get to. I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything that I was missing.