Writing lessons from Maya Angelou

I often complain to my husband that nothing ever happens to me. At least, nothing happens to me compared to Maya Angelou.

If you read the obituaries of Angelou after her death last May, you will remember the impossible variety contained in the famous writer’s life. Any one person who becomes San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor, an opera singer on European tour, the owner of a brothel, a Civil Rights organizer, a cook, dancer, poet, and a journalist for a radical Cairo newspaper, deserves to write memoirs. I, on the other hand, am reaping the quiet rewards of a stable childhood and happy marriage. This is a blessing, I know. But not the usual fodder for books.

Maya Angelou’s eventful memoirs, we believe, are composed of none other than the stuff of real life. Imagine my surprise when I shut the first volume one afternoon, terrified I had reached the ending of a story eons from a solution, and discovered the volume had six sequels!

Since that afternoon, I have spent many days in the company of Angelou’s words, journeying with her from Harlem to Europe to Africa. Through her eyes, I have met Martin Luther King Jr., Billie Holiday, Malcom X, and many other historical persons whose import I do not fully recognize because of my youth. But I have not found the thing I was looking for. I have not uncovered Angelou’s magic procedure for living a life worth writing about.

I read in Business Insider that Angelou routinely rented a hotel room, arrived around 6:15 a.m., and had a glass of sherry as she wrote. She said she had to stop and remember that language is a pliable tool, that if she tugged at it, it would acquiesce. And then, I guess, the manifold experiences of her life flooded onto the page like a water main had broken. Very different from the writing routine I observed this morning, which involved my pajamas, a bowl of cherries, some chocolate milk, and a short scream that meant, “Nothing happens to me. Writing is impossible!”

But the more I read Angelou, the more I understand the goodness of her work does not owe to the tumultuous string of events she lived through, nor even to her unusual accomplishments. It is good because Angelou knew how to use language to transfer her loves. As you read, you do not always agree with her. But you love her. You love her brother Bailey, her Arkansas grandmother, and her precocious young son. She gives you a passel of people to adore. Even without the historical uproar, that would be enough.

This realization puts a quick stop to my whining. I realize I do not have to appear on the frontlines of history for my personal stories to matter. Why should I grumble at the way God wrote my life? The purposeful life story of a saint—beginning in futility, ending in unimaginable glory, each event handpicked by God—is never small. And if I know how to see, not one of my simple, comparatively sleepy stories will bore me. If I can learn how to share my loves, they shouldn’t bore anyone else, either.