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Writing Like Maya

The Statistics

  • Writing Period: March 24 - April 16

  • Words: 6,212+

  • Metaphors and Similes: 13

  • Words/Hour: 497.0 (~12.5 hours)

 

The Writer: Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

— American author, poet, and civil rights activist

— Born in St. Louis, Missouri

Quote-worthy: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Famous Works

  • I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  • On the Pulse of Morning (1993)

  • Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1994)

  • Many other autobiographical works and poems

 

Writing Style

  • Attempt to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page; work at the language, it is pliable

  • Words may be feathery, descriptions poetic, but not a single word is wasted

  • Writing described as intimate, idiosyncratic, ornate, descriptive

 

Writing Routine

  • Rent a hotel room and try to begin work there at 6:30 AM

  • Write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible

  • Review what’s been written around 5 PM that day

Writing Advice

  • Develop the art of saying, “No. No, I’m finished. Bye.”; do not write the story into the ground; do not write the life out of it

  • One’s own editing, before the editor has seen the work, is the most important

  • Write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain straight to the heart

  • Tell the truth about the human being — “what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other”

  • The more creativity you use, the more you have

 

Sources

The Reflection

I first became acquainted with Maya Angelou when I read a portion of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in middle school. At that time, I cannot claim to have been affected on a personal level by her words. Then I came across the memoir in its entirety a few years ago and I began to see her as a wise-cracking and wisdom-filled grandmotherly woman.

 

Turns out, emulating Maya’s writing style and routine was the most fun out of the four writers I did end up emulating. I didn’t rent a hotel room or keep a bottle of sherry or the bible on hand or even write religiously in the morning. What I did do was pull out that yellow legal pad and write to my heart’s content with an engraved pen given to me by a good friend.

 

I thought I would abhor writing by hand, but I think I actually quite like it. I tried to be feathery and poetic with language in places and made special efforts to tell the truth about human beings. I was particularly proud of the section where two of the main characters encounter one of the villains, because I threw in description pertaining to all five senses (I believe).

 

What I most enjoyed about this method was first writing on the yellow legal pad and then transferring that to the typed-up story on the computer. In the process of transcription, I was able to make small edits as I saw fit. The typed-up sections where I emulated Maya, then, are basically like a second draft already. Knowing that I would be typing up whatever I had written by hand also had the effect of making the writing free flowing; even if I didn’t care for something I’d written by hand, I’d have an almost immediate chance to go back over it when I typed it up.

 

As I continue writing Project Novella: The Kingdom (you may have noticed it remains unfinished), I will most likely continue with this approach.

  • Words/Day: 517.7 (12 days)

  • Cups of Coffee Consumed: ~31

  • Alcoholic Beverages a Non-Factor

(Second half of Part IV; Part V)

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