Maya Angelou's Framework

Angelou told the Paris Review in 1990 that she kept a hotel room in every town she lived in, renting it for months at a time. She rose about 5:30, had coffee with her husband at six, and after he left at 6:30 she drove to the room, arriving around seven. It was small and mean, just a bed and sometimes a basin, and she asked the staff to change nothing. She brought a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry, and wrote lying across the bed until about two, or 12:30 if it was going badly, her elbow calloused from it. At home she reread the day's pages, showered, cooked and ate a proper, quiet dinner. Sometimes she read the work aloud to her husband, not for critique but to hear where the language jarred, so she could fix it in the morning. The week here gives the room eight hours, as the chart draws it, then an evening built around the reread and the meal. The idea to steal is the separate place with nothing in it: somewhere the work is the only thing that can happen.