How to Find Your Passion and Purpose for Writing with Maya Angelou as Your Guide

Write

Oct 9

Maya Angelou was one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to being a writer, Sister Maya was a teacher, a civil rights activist, and above all, she was a lover of humanity. In a word, Maya Angelou was a gift to the world. And while she enjoyed multiple careers over her lifetime, let’s look at the lessons Maya Angelou has to share about being a successful writer. You can listen to the podcast episode to hear these lessons or keep reading below.

Maya Angelou was a Jack of All Trades and a Master of Many

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, before she settled into her career as a writer Maya Angelou had jobs as a street car conductor in San Francisco, she was a professional singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director. She was a short-order cook, a civil rights activist who worked with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and she worked in marketing and journalism.

Early in her career when she was on a world tour of Porgy & Bess, Maya ended up learning the languages of many of the countries she visited because she apparently had an incredible facility for languages. So, in addition to all of the professional identities she had, Maya was also a polyglot who spoke English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, and Fanti.

While sometimes driven by painful circumstances, most often Maya Angelou’s zest for life and people and experiences was the engine that drove her through a lifetime of incredible careers and experiences. Maya Angelou was simply a person who was determined to experience all that life had to offer. And that gave her much to write about.

Writing as a Second Act

You may be surprised to learn that Maya Angelou was 40 years old when her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969. Yes, she was 40 years old, and she really had no intention of tackling a book manuscript but her editor/friend pushed her to share her life story and she finally stopped saying no, and opened herself up fully to making her second act in life all about writing.

Once she started writing in earnest, churning out a total of 32 books over her lifetime, Maya realized that her writing was a form of teaching, so she embraced that role and finished her career as a university professor at Wake Forest University. “I always said I am a writer who can teach, but now I realize that I am a teacher who can write,” Angelou said on the cusp of her retirement.

And indeed, Maya Angelou had so much to teach us. It was very clear that Maya Angelou wanted to teach all of us to be better human beings. As an activist and an artist, her underlying message was always that love liberates.

How to Be a Purpose-Driven Writer Like Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou had some very specific lessons to teach us as writers. Lessons we should all remember and incorporate into our own writing lives.

Writers must Live a Full Life: When you look at Dr. Maya’s life, a life full of adventures, heartache, heartbreak, and love. Of courage, of traveling the world, of meeting all kinds of people, of saying yes to all of the opportunities that come to you, I think the lesson is clear, live life. Embrace it. Experience it, So that then you might have something to say. Soak it all up and then squeeze it out on the page. Maya Angelou went on to write seven volumes of her autobiography/ I call them memoirs, but she wrote 7 volumes. She had 7 volumes to write because she lived such a full life. Now do you need to go live 7 volumes worth of life? No. But you do need to live. To say yes to opportunity. To collect languages, and colors, and flavors and stories, so that when you sit down to write, you have something to say. You have a treasure chest of characters, sounds, settings and dialogue even to pull from.
Start where you are and grow into the writer you want to be: Maya Angelou fell in love with poetry as a young girl. And when she started to write, she started with poetry because it was her first love and the form she was most familiar with. But then she moved on to songs, which are poems set to words, then screen plays, then TV scripts, then stage plays, and she finally found her way to memoir when she was in her late 30s. Maya didn’t go to school to learn how to write, but she did surround herself with writers and creative people. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, befriended people like James Baldwin and she consumed a lot of great writing. She was always reading and memorizing poetry so she started there, but then she just kept writing once she decided to make writing a priority. . Her poetry won her a Pulitzer prize. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was nominated for a National Book Award. She’s won several other awards for her writing, so obviously, her methodology worked. And it can work for you too.

“I love writing. I have a passion for it so I don’t mind the struggle.”

Sacrifice and Struggle are part of the Job Description: Let’s be clear, just leading an exciting colorful life isn’t going to be enough to write wonderful prose. Maya told Oprah Winfrey in an interview, “You can only be great at the things you are willing to sacrifice for.” Maya Angelou admitted that she was good at many things and she enjoyed working in all of these different fields but she said her only two real passions were dancing and writing and she knew that because they were the only things she was truly willing to sacrifice for. The writing doesn’t just come, we have to work at it.
Use Your Words to Heal the World: Finally, if you pay attention to Maya Angelou’s writing, you will see that there is a through-line through her life, art and activism. Everything she did was in service to elevating the stories of Black people and bridging the divide between humanity. She wrote 32 books in total, memoir, essays, poetry, children’s books, and cook books. All of these books, all of these words, I would say, carry the spirit of uplift. Maya Angelou used the power of her words, the power of her voice, to teach us, to love us and to liberate us all. And if you know her life story, Maya Angelou was a selective mute for five years after being sexually abused as a child. But once she reclaimed her voice, she refused to be silenced ever again and in fact used her voice on the page and out loud to tell the stories she believed would help those who needed it most.

Words Live Beyond the Page

Maya Angelou was insistent that we writers understand that “words mean more than what is set down on paper.” She told us that words are powerful. If you are a writer and you have a story that needs to be told, especially one that will heal somebody out in the world who needs it, then it is your responsibility to use your voice. Use your words. Sit down at your desk and write your story. And get it out into the world. Particularly BIPOC writers whose words have too often been silenced.

She showed us that even our messy, imperfect lives, even the ugly bits, if we are generous enough to share them with the world, we can help someone else in need. We can help heal those who are hurting. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,” Maya said. “It sings because it has a song.”

Maya Angelou’s Wisdom and Writing Practice

In her later years when asked what her writing schedule and practice was like, she said that she actually kept a hotel room in the same town where she lived and she would go there every day at 6:30am. She said she never wrote at home because she wanted to step away from the world she regularly inhabited. In her simple hotel room, she kept three things on her desk, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and the Bible. She wrote on a legal pad, and she also kept a deck of cards to play solitaire when she needed to occupy her mind and wait for her mind to catch up to her imagination. She never allowed herself to use the words writers block because she didn’t want to buy into the idea that such a thing existed. “I’m careful about the words I use,” she said because her mind might start believing in writer's block if she gave it a name.

Maya Angelou became an ancestor at age 86 in 2014.

Thank you, Saint Maya Angelou for sharing your words with us and teaching us everything you knew to be true.