James McBride’s Writing Routine

“Writing is an act of faith. You have to fall in love with the idea. Let the story take over. And get out of the way.”

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