Toni Morrison's Daily Routine

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. For most of her early career she was also a senior editor at Random House, where she published Black writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. She wrote her first novels as a single mother with a full-time job, in the hours before dawn.

She told The Paris Review in 1993 that writing before dawn began as a necessity: she needed the time before her small children said "Mama", which was always around 5:00 AM. Her ritual was to make coffee while it was still dark and watch the light come. With a nine-to-five job, the rest of the writing went into weekends. Some accounts, like Famous Writing Routines, put her start at 4:00 AM, and that's the time we use.

It's for parents and anyone with a full-time job who wants to make something of their own: you give up late nights and get a quiet hour nobody else can claim. The commute, office hours, evenings and weekend writing blocks are our estimates.