The Writer’s Almanac, as they often do, has some insight about Toni Morrison:
She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, “It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own. …
Morrison said, “[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It’s like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I’m certain I’m going to come up.”