Yaa Gyasi

Usually, my irrational bargaining goes something like this: I start working at around 10 if I’m feeling motivated, 11 if I’m not. I reread the work from the day before and/or passages that I think I got right in order to try to set the tone. I write a sentence. I read it aloud. I delete the sentence. I look at the clock and wonder if it’s too early to think about lunch. I tell myself that, if I can make it to 300 words, I can break for lunch.

On the best days, I stop pleading, stop bargaining and watch-checking and fall into a rhythm so satisfying that I simply forget I’m working. So much of my writing day feels like well-digging. Sometimes I dig 200ft down before coming back up, dry. Every day I search for water.

The desk helps, now that I have it. I’ve stacked piles of books that I love on it to act as talismans. They help, too. The desk makes me feel like I’m going to work, even though work is located in a cramped but bright corner of my living room. […] I used to think of myself as someone with a great deal of discipline, but I lost it in the air somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. Now, instead of discipline, I have a desk, and every day that I sit at it I dig a little deeper.

Home can never really be a place. It is this thing that you carry inside of you.

Homegoing spans about 250 years of Ghanaian and American history. Some of this history I knew a bit about, but the novel did require an extensive amount of research, which was by far the most difficult part in the process of writing.

I think one of the best things that art can do is to shine a light on dark places, and to hold something up and say: 'This hasn't gone unnoticed. We see this, and we're going to say something about it.'

I don't think I really understood that you could choose writing as a profession for many years later. It wasn't really until I was 17, when I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and saw, 'Oh, someone like me, a black woman, can do this ...