James McBride’s creative life began with music. He studied composition at Oberlin, played jazz saxophone in bars, and tried to carve out a career in musical theatre. But over time, writing emerged as another way to tell the stories that mattered to him. He started in journalism, then turned to memoir. His breakthrough came in 1996 with The Color of Water, a tribute to his mother—a white Jewish woman who raised twelve Black children in a Brooklyn housing project. The book became an unexpected hit, selling millions of copies, finding its way into classrooms across the country, and launching McBride into a second life as a writer.
McBride is drawn to hidden histories and overlooked lives. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna, emerged from the war stories his uncle used to tell about serving in an all-Black unit during World War II. The research took years. He moved his family to Italy, tracked down veterans, lived among the ruins. He didn’t want to write a straightforward war novel. He wanted to show the miracle: the fragile beauty that can emerge in the middle of suffering. Fiction, he’s said, allows for that. “The dead can come back to life. Miracles happen. And someone is there to witness them.”
Since then, McBride has written novels (The Good Lord Bird, Deacon King Kong, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store), short stories (Five-Carat Soul), and biographies (Kill ‘Em and Leave, about James Brown). His work is rich in voice and rooted in community. His characters—preachers and drunks, musicians and grocers, immigrants and orphans—are funny, haunted, and stubbornly alive. His stories rarely follow a neat arc. They sprawl and intersect, like cities. There’s comedy, violence, redemption, and always a sense of moral purpose. McBride doesn’t write to settle scores. He writes to preserve innocence. “You need a sense of discovery as a writer,” he says. “If you know everything, you shouldn’t be writing. You should be God.”
James McBride’s daily writing routine
McBride doesn’t believe in perfect conditions. He can write anywhere—in a noisy café, on a train, in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment overlooking a Citi Bike rack. He wakes up early, usually around 4:30 or 5 a.m., and writes longhand in a notebook until mid-morning. That early stretch is sacred. “At five in the morning, I’m too sleepy to do anything but think about what I was last working on. My mind is clearer.”
After a few hours of writing, he stops. The rest of the day is for “monkeying around”—paying bills, practicing saxophone, taking care of his kids, making tea. He might return to the work in the evening, especially if a project has momentum. But he rarely writes for more than four or five hours a day. “Writing is like music,” he says. “You’ve got to leave some space. Otherwise, it’s just noise.”
McBride starts his books with research. Sometimes he makes maps, draws the neighborhood, or writes biographies for his characters. Most of that material never makes it into the final manuscript, but he needs it to find the story’s emotional core. He doesn’t write detailed outlines. He follows instinct. Characters lead the way, and the plot emerges. “You go by faith,” he says. “You don’t really know what’s going to happen. You just hope.”
He writes the first twenty or thirty pages longhand. Then he switches to a typewriter or computer. He rewrites constantly. Whole drafts are thrown away. Even emails are revised before they’re sent. “The insert key is deadly,” he once joked. “You really have to push forward, knowing you’ll discard and rewrite everything.”
McBride doesn’t listen to music while writing. As a musician, it’s too distracting. But he writes with a musician’s sense of rhythm and improvisation. His best scenes feel like solos: loose, expressive, surprising. He believes in showing the best side of people, in telling stories where kindness triumphs and love finds a way. “A writer has to preserve innocence,” he says. “That’s where the magic comes from.”
Even after all his success—bestsellers, major awards, film adaptations—McBride stays grounded. He still works in the Brooklyn housing project where he was raised, running a music program for kids. The people there don’t care that he won the National Book Award. They care that he shows up. That he listens.
“Writing is an act of faith,” he says. “You have to fall in love with the idea. Let the story take over. And get out of the way.”
No Comments