Why Maya Angelou wrote in bare motel rooms

A closer look

Writing is hard enough without being distracted by your own nice furniture. To achieve total focus, Maya Angelou would routinely rent a cheap, generic motel room in whatever city she lived in. She ordered management to remove all the artwork from the walls to maintain absolute visual boredom. She would arrive at 6:30 AM with legal pads, a Bible, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry, leveraging sensory deprivation and daytime drinking to craft pure poetry.