I found a diary I had kept one summer ten years earlier; it contained information that I knew I could use. I opened the diary eagerly but soon turned away from it, stricken. The writing was soaked in a kind of girlish self-pity—“alone again!”—that I found odious. More than odious, threatening. As I read on, I felt myself being sucked back into its atmosphere, unable to hold on to the speaking voice I was working hard to develop. I threw the diary down in a panic, then felt confused and defeated. A few days later I tried again, but again felt myself going under. At last, I put it away.

One day—when I had been looking over an accumulation of pages possessed of what seemed to me the sufficiently right tone, syntax, and perspective—I opened the diary again, read in it a bit, laughed, got interested, even absorbed, and within minutes was making notes. With relief I thought, I’m not losing myself. Suddenly I realized there was no myself to lose. I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me. The narrator was the me who could not leave her mother because she had become her mother. She was not intimidated by “alone again.” Nor, come to think of it, was she much influenced by the me who was a walker in the city, or a divorced middle-aged feminist, or a financially insecure writer. She was, apparently, only her solid, limited self—and she was in control. I saw what I had done: I had created a persona.

On one of the few occasions Morrison spoke explicitly and at length in print about what her work as an editor entailed, she described her work this way:

Editing sometimes requires restricting, setting loose or nailing down; paragraphs, pages may need rewriting; sentences (especially final or opening ones) may need to be deleted or recast; incomplete images or thoughts may need expansion, development. Sometimes the point is buried or too worked-up. Other times the tone is “off,” the voice is wrong or unforthcoming or so self-regarding it distorts or misshapes the characters it wishes to display. In some manuscripts traps are laid so the reader is sandbagged into focussing on the author’s superior gifts or knowledge rather than the intimate, reader-personalised world fiction can summon.

With a few exceptions, Morrison’s editing of the poems in the volume was light. Clifton had titled a poem “I Am a Black Woman,” for instance. “There must be 800 of these,” meaning poems with that title, Morrison wrote. So she suggested calling it “And I Am Not Done Yet,” which was the first line of the poem in draft. In its published version, Clifton shifted the first line to the title, dropped the conjunction and, and began the poem with the line “as possible as yeast/ as imminent as bread.” The poem “To Ms. Ann,” Morrison noted, worked “marvelously.

You could have written some lousy, sensational, sexy book and you’d probably not have this problem,’ she remarked. “(Except some other editor would have to publish it.) but you wrote a good one and it is slowly but surely finding its readership (almost 2,000 people!).” Her first novel, she often repeated to authors she worked with, sold a mere three thousand copies before gaining traction. Great reviews of a first novel could set the stage for more sales for a second novel. But Look What They Done to My Song— the quiet, little book she loved— was the only book they would publish together.

It would make all the difference in terms of getting the attention of reviewers, critics, and readers alike. Morrison was prepared to delay the book’s publication for months if needed, in fact, to avoid sending it out naked— that is, without the right quotes from the right people announcing the book’s achievement.