The Center Was Always Ours: What Toni Morrison Proved About Writing for Your Own People
Toni Morrison had a problem.
She wanted to read books that centered Black life—not as a problem to be solved, not as a footnote to white stories, not as explanation or apology. She wanted books the told of Black people who were fully human, complex, flawed, beautiful, struggling, triumphant. Books that highlighted Black interiority as the default. Books in which Black language, Black culture, and Black history were the center not the margin.
Those books didn’t exist. At least, not in the way she wanted them to.
So she wrote them herself.
And in doing so, she changed American literature forever.
Don’t Explain a Thing That Doesn’t Need Explaining
Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She was thirty-nine years old, a single mother of two sons, working as an editor at Random House while waking early in the morning while it was still dark to tend her “dirty habit.” Of it, she says:
I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come….I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular….Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact….For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense. (Ohana.org)
The Bluest Eye tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio who believes that if she had blue eyes—white features—she would be loved. It’s a devastating exploration of internalized racism, colorism, and the violence white beauty standards have on Black bodies.
The novel begins: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.”
“Quiet as it’s kept”—this is Black vernacular. It signals intimacy, insider knowledge, the kind of story you tell within the community. Morrison starts her novel with Black speech, Black rhythm, Black interiority. She doesn’t translate. She doesn’t explain. She writes as if her reader already understands.
Because her reader—the one she’s writing for—does.
Morrison said in interviews that she wrote for Black readers. She wasn’t writing to explain Black life to white people. She wasn’t writing to prove Black humanity to skeptics. In her mind, to write to prove that was the ultimate waste of time and talent—a distraction. She was writing for us—for Black people who deserved to see ourselves in literature.
Still, her work is universal. When you write so specific, so deeply and truthfully, it becomes universal. When you center your own community without apology, you create art that reveals and immerses—art that resonates.
The Border Is the Center
In a 1998 interview with Australian journalist Jana, Morrison said:
“I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central. Claimed it. And let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
Don’t you love the audacity! Taking what the dominant culture has marginalized and insisting it’s central.
Morrison did this in every novel:
The Bluest Eye centers a dark-skinned Black girl’s inner life
Sula centers Black female friendship and nonconformity
Song of Solomon centers Black mythology and folk tradition
Beloved centers the interior life of an enslaved woman haunted by the child she killed to save from slavery
Jazz centers Harlem in the 1920s through the lens of a love triangle
These are not books about racism (though racism is present). They’re not explanations of Black life for white readers. They’re books about Black people being Black, living Black lives, in all their complexity.
Morrison refused the white gaze and didn’t give a thought to writing for white comfort.
Her disinterest in what majority culture wanted from her on the page made her work undeniable. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her entire body of work. And in 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She became one of the most celebrated writers in American history.
The Opportunities This Opens for Us
Because so many of us—especially those of us from marginalized communities—internalize the white gaze without even realizing it. We write to prove our humanity. We explain cultural references. We soften our language. We worry: Will they understand? Will they think we’re angry? Will they buy this?
Here are the opportunities Morrison’s example prove are also open to you when you take up that next writing project.
1. Write for our own community first.
If you’re a writer of color, or a writer from a specific cultural background or marginalized community—write for your people first.
Don’t write to explain your culture to outsiders or to prove you’re worthy. Don’t soften your language to make others comfortable or pad your truth to make it palatable.
Write for the people who already understand. Write for the people who need to see their authentic selves reflected in literature. Center those stories and perspectives.
When you do this, your work will be more authentic, more powerful, and ironically, more universal.
2. You don’t have to translate everything.
Morrison didn’t put glossaries in her books, nor did she use appositive phrases to explain every cultural reference or piece of Black vernacular. She trusted her reader to either understand or figure it out.
I don’t know about you, but this is my favorite kind of reading, even when reading books about other peoples and cultures I may not be familiar with. I love being written to like I’m could possibly be an insider. That feeds the curiosity in me to learn more.
You can do the same with your writing.
If your characters code-switch, let them. If they use slang or dialect, let them. If they reference cultural practices that not everyone will know, let them.
Your job is not to make your work accessible to everyone. Your job is to write truthfully.
3. Claim the center.
Don’t write from the margins, hoping to be invited to the center.
Write from your center. Write as if your community, your culture, your perspective is the default. Because it is—in your book.
Morrison said she stood at the border and claimed it as central. You can too.
4. Specificity is your strength.
A lot of writers are told to make their work “universal” or “relatable.” Universal and relatable to whom? White culture is not the default and universal doesn’t mean generic. Universality is about what’s true to the human condition.
Morrison wrote about a Black girl in 1940s Ohio. About a Black family in Michigan. About formerly enslaved people in post-Civil War Ohio. These are specific stories. But they resonate with readers across cultures and time periods because they're truthfully told.
Your specificity—your culture, your language, your perspective—is not a limitation. It's your greatest strength.
5. Write the book you want to read.
This is Morrison’s most famous advice: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
What book do you wish existed? What story hasn’t been told the way it needs to be told? What perspective is missing from the conversation?
If it’s a space you know, then write that.
Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Don’t wait for permission. Just write it.
The Legacy She Left
Toni Morrison died in 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. She left behind eleven novels, several works of nonfiction, and a literary legacy that will endure for generations.
But more than that, she opened the door for Black writers to write the themes of life from their perspective as they live it. Sometimes it can be necessary to write to white readers, but our truest selves and experience happen within our own communities, between each other. Truths and revelations are often passed between knowing looks, affirming sounds, and short vernacular phrases.
While we need no one’s permission to be ourselves, Toni Morrison showed what it looks like to be fully one’s own self in the midst and at the height of a system, an industry that has defined self as what makes sense to the dominant majority.
She showed what it is for Black writers to unapologetically write Black stories. What it is for all writers to center their own communities without apology. To refuse the gaze of those who don’t matter. To claim the center.
Morrison wrote in such a way that changed the literary world forever. But there’s more work to do. More stories to tell. More books that need to be written.
So what are you waiting for?
What book do you wish existed but hasn't been written yet? That's the one you should write. Tell me in the comments. I want to know what story the world is missing.
Every great book starts with a great hook. Learn how to craft yours with my free Book Hook Cheat Sheet—and start writing the book only you can write.