This was the advice of author Toni Morrison, who passed away last week, aged 88, leaving behind such a rich legacy. She was not only an author, but also an essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, and I imagine it was very challenging for her to write it. At the time, she was a single mother to two children and working as a fiction editor at Random House, New York City (the first black woman senior editor there). Finding quiet, alone time in which to write meant getting up at four a.m. every day. She must have been exhausted, but her quote tells us that this was a book she wanted to read, and so she had to write it – no matter how much emotional and physical energy that took.

Not only did Morrison write her novel but, crucially, she published it. The Bluest Eye covers themes that were controversial, including racism, incest and child abuse. To this day, the novel is usually in the top ten of the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books. But Morrison knew that this was a book that she wanted to read – and she wanted others to read it too.

After The Bluest Eye came ten more novels, including the Pulizer Prize-winning Beloved (1988). For her writing, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012.

Toni Morrison’s work and teachings have been a great source of inspiration to me, and to so many others. I don’t know when I first read ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it’; it seems like it has always been in my mind, somehow, propelling me into my dream of writing.

The characters for my novels come to me in quiet moments, but then, quickly, they begin to clamour to be heard. Soon, a story has formed in my mind. It’s a story I want to read. The logic is so simple then: the story must be written. Even if I am busy. Even if I am tired. To be a dreamer is to have stories within; to be a writer is to write them down.

Publishing, Elena Ferrante reminded us in her columns for the Guardian, is optional. If the words are in you, you must write, but sharing the story is a personal choice. Or, perhaps, a need. For writers, stories are a way of communicating with the world; a way of being – as Ferrante writes, ‘I believe that books, once written, have no need of their authors.’ Publishing then becomes not only a way of sharing, but a way of letting go.

So, I write the book I want to read – the book that is haunting me; the book I must somehow breathe into existence – and then I share the book; I let it go. And then, invariably, a new book comes to me. It’s a cycle as natural to me now as the turn of the seasons. It’s a beautiful way to live, and, someday, to be remembered. As Toni Morrison wrote:

‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’