Always Be Returning
The thing about being a writer is that you are not just a writer, you are many things. You are a friend, you’re an employee, you are tired, you are lazy, you’re a student or a parent or a combination of a thousand personalities and responsibilities, each one wrestling for your time, energy and passion. You have to fit your writing into the tangle of your life. and that is a difficult thing to do.
What the fellowship forced me to do was to take my writing seriously for three whole months, to negotiate with work and life and rest to make space for writing. It pushed me to find the right rhythm to accommodate this and the process of discovery was one that taught me a lot about myself.
I write best around four in the morning, when the air is still and silent and not yet clouded by the day’s frustrations. Before the birds start to welcome dawn, when it’s just me and the crickets and the screen, it feels like I can make any story real. But, I wouldn’t have been able to wake up every morning, blurry-eyed, staring resentfully at my phone screen, while my “WAKE UP AND WRITE!” alarm blared, if I didn’t have the validation of someone looking at my work and deciding that it was worth nurturing.
My goal was to expand my short story, A Name is A Plea and A Prophecy, into a novella. The story was unpublished at the time, but it was and still is my favourite thing I’ve ever written. It is a favourite for many reasons. First, when I realised what its final form would be after months of fattening it and stripping it and picking at its skin, I was in awe of it. It marked an evolution in my writing style, my skill and my belief in myself. It was something that I would have loved even if I had not written it. The second reason is that it houses my favourite character that I’ve ever written.This is noteworthy because I generally dislike main characters, even the ones I write. When I write them, they are often l just vehicles for the story and I have to introduce a side character that I actually enjoy. In Plea and Prophecy, I wrote a character that would not leave my head, who was a strong enough spine to hold up the narrative. All of these things and more made me not just love, but believe in this story.
After fifteen rejections from short story magazines, I still believed in it enough to use an excerpt for my fellowship application and to build a longer work on its foundation. The acceptance only strengthened that belief.
I think it’s extremely important for a writer to love, have faith in and enjoy the process and/or the results of writing, if not life will overwhelm the work. And it is work. It is difficult and demanding and draining and thankless and rewarding, and it takes effort and intention and strategic thinking to start and finish something.
I very quickly stopped trying to write at the end of my workdays. I was always too drained, exhausted and completely disenchanted, a state of mind that isn’t exactly conducive for writing speculative fiction. So I found pockets of possibility in the mornings. I pushed myself to write 500 words a day, often more.
I wrote a lot of nonsense. Suyi had already told us that our first drafts were not the be all and end all, that the goal was to “always be returning”, but that didn’t stop me from looking at the wordson my screen and questioning whether I could even write at all or from Googling “how bad should a first draft be” just to be sure.
I stuck with it for the full three months and gave myself a goal of 20,000 words. At the end I was rewarded with about that number of words. It was disjointed, poorly punctuated, littered with comments suggesting fixes that I had been too lazy to make the first time around. It was nowhere near good, but it was something I could return to.
The Literary Laddership allowed me to lay the foundation for what comes next. Suyi’s guidance helped me pick a direction for my work, get to know my characters better, give the story a frame, and most importantly to persevere. No matter how exhausted I am, I love this work, and I will be returning.
If you're an emerging African author who is looking to take your writing to the next level—especially continental writers from underrepresented communities—we strongly encourage you to submit your work for consideration. See eligibility and application details below.