Eneh Akpan Writes: Writer's Digest

Showing posts with label Writer's Digest. Show all posts

Monday, June 15, 2015

IntShoWriMo 2015: Day 15: Curiosity is a Provable Fact

IntShoWriMo 2015: Day 15 Prompts:
You’re a private investigator who is down on his or her luck and hasn’t had a client in months. Suddenly the phone rings. It’s a kid. The kid proposes a silly case to you. Normally you wouldn’t take such a ridiculous job (from a kid, no less), but you need the work, so you accept. But what you uncover during the investigation is a much, much bigger problem than the kid (and you) ever expected. — WritersDigest.Com

Word Count: 2k+

Akpan

Friday, December 12, 2014

Stable Story

I hear your thoughts

Speak to me of a low-down universe.

I get swayed and ask, ‘how can these things be?’

Comes your sweet reply, ‘you can, if you’ll only believe.’

‘I’m crippled by my fears, how can I be strong?’

You answer, ‘There’s no fear in a season made for love.’

‘Does that mean, even for a tramp, no room for bias?’

‘Love was born in a stable why this is Christmas.’

I come as I am

A material witness to an irrefutable plan,

To testify that reality lives inside your hearts.

And if you truly believe that’ll only be a start.

Akpan

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

DAY 1: Brave

Friday, February 28, 2014

Gift of a Man.mp3 (Poetry Recital)

Click on the link Gift of a Man above to listen to this recital.

Gift of a Man exploits the power of the special and peculiar ability available to every man. There is some unique curiosities surrounding the harnessing of one's talent that the human race is yet to fully awaken to.

Gift of a Man digs below the surface to the very core of this mystery and unleashes the listener within grappling distance of what he deserves and already possesses.

Akpan

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Grub.mp3 (Poetry Recital)

English: Odoh Diego Okenyodo reads from his co...

Courtesy: Wikipedia

Click the link above and listen.

This poem is about a character struggling with his inner critic; that negative voice that tries to seduce us all to the down side. And guilt-trip us with thoughts that we can't make it through the storm. This poet persona wins the battle and the poem's about his victory.

Akpan

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Grounds to 'Read With a Pencil Close By'

Here are a handful of grounds to “Read with a pencil close by.” I found out it is still one of the best advices ever given to writers or students of the printed text.

Mark Phrases/Sentences & Paragraphs

When a phrase or paragraph catches my eye and sparks up a desire for complemental musing, I mark it using a colored pen/pencil or highlighter. I feel much better having a textual landmark around it, knowing it will arouse zeal whenever I spot it.

A Sign of Commitment

I pick up a fiction/nonfiction text then grab for a colored pencil or highlighter and I feel a sense of commitment. The pen/pencil informs every nerve in my body that I mean business. I aint just doing this for fun, I intend to come off the reading project with a lesson and some learned.

Recall Entire Textual Matter

It’s a lot more easy to call up words from memory if you underline/mark them when you read. I do that often and when my mind coughs up those peculiar sentences they usually appear on the wall of my subconscious as images. I visualize the interesting set of words hemmed in by my scrawls before the title of the book essentially floats to the surface.

Spot Peculiar Phrases/Sentences/Paragraphs

I find I can navigate the text with ease when I circle or box words that chase my fancy. For me, it’s become less stressful identifying a line or box in the middle of a page, to find the sentence or phrase it guards. I can pick out these phrases during my research period. The lines and symbols seem to beg for my attention.

Lookout for Peculiar Twists

Having a highlighter close by where I can reach it and tag a phrase keeps my faculty amped up and on the lookout for expressions full of shades of meaning. The search for inspired language morphs into a conscious, energetic process and for somebody out to learn a new thing that’s a lot.

That’s all folks. I guess you know what you need for your next reading exercise besides the text, that is.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Reprieve

Courtesy: 1songday.com

Prose poetry

Come; walk with me out of yourselves. See the vision of the world through the very eyes of childhood.

Take my hand. Let us traverse the threshold of freedom and savor the fragrance of unspoken seductions. We have been held down for way too long; held back from what is rightfully ours to explore. Let us exploit life in the fierce urgency of now and activate our miracle metamorphosis.

We never need to waste motion. You and I belong together in a world where bold compassion has been stolen, bought and sold; mutilated beyond repair. But our resolve has been refined in the forge of tribulation. Now the harvest trundles in on a thunder of deafening wings.

Housemates in a strange place we have found ourselves to be. Yet, none can erase what we really are if we clench the dream in a fist of optimism. The answer to our prayers lay hidden in trackless wilderness nevertheless, we will seek it like lost treasure.

Until we arrive at the end of our rainbow and seize the pot of gold, we must not give up hope to the jaws of despair. Eventually, we become Champions of the struggle when we mop up hate diagrams with bundles of kind acts and clog the gears of coldness with fruits of tenderness.

Akpan

Sunday, June 2, 2013

IntShoWriMo 2013: DAY 2

African Pear Tree with Fruit. Courtesy: gibex.com

Today’s Prompt:

You put your house on the market and, on the first day, an extremely old woman comes knocking on your door. She’s not interested in buying your house, though. Instead, she tells you that this is the house she lived in as a child. The friendly mood suddenly changes when she reveals something terrible that took place in the house years ago.

Courtesy: writersdigest.com

Link for Day 2: DAY 2: Plague House Word Count: 2,721

Wish I could write the prompt says it all. But that would be lazy. I’m supposed to add my own twist to the story, right?

The rains are upon us in Nigeria. And it just so happens to be the season for the African pear. Many people probably never heard of the African pear fruit before. It’s what you got in the image up there. It goes best with roasted or boiled maize corn. Take it with any of the two and it slides down your throat like silk. Oil palm plantations like African pear trees are lush in down south Nigeria. I employed these two items in inventing a story of the paranormal about a house that didn’t much fancy families.

In the words of one of the characters in the story,

“Something here does not have much respect for family maybe, because it was deprived of its loved ones in its own lifetime.”

Read the full story here, DAY 2: Plague House

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Sunday, October 21, 2012

What Do Writers Do?

When you pick up your pen to write, what thoughts dance to the edge of your mind? When you sit to think on paper, what ideas drive your muse? What devils you?

In writing, a ransacking of the faculty is set in motion like the turning out of pockets of a school kid would reveal what s/he’s been up to. It’s an adventure into the still small things that run deep. Because a writer is the freak who would not let sleeping dogs lie.

Sometimes, a writer may present answers to nagging issues. But, much of the time, writers raise dusts that are impossible to still. They are literary mischief-makers with a knack for exhuming best forgotten matters. It is the writer’s business to guarantee the dust does not settle on a matter.

Writers seemingly crave for knowledge that’s never theirs to attain. Desecrating history’s sarcophagus like Time’s own tomb raiders yet, trying their very best to be quiet about the whole subject (as if that was possible). As time goes by, they become fairly successful at keeping the peace like woodpeckers in a forest of silence boring deep circlets into the trunk of century old trees. And in a manner similar to these species of avian activities, always taking quick peeks between pecks, glances that were they words could mean, ‘Am I disturbing the peace, now?’ or ‘Am I prodding a raw nerve, yet?’

I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? Writing is a gift. A blessing as well as a curse. Not if you’re Sylvia Plath who predicted her own demise in her poetry and effectively closed that chapter. Taking her own life.

Writing is also savage pleasure. A trespassing if you like that word better. A mending of broken links and a crossing of boundaries, unlocking of painful memories, stripping it right down to its birth suit and taking heart-wrenching moments to nibble at minutiae.

This obsessive streak has a way of turning on the writer. Stephen King said he wrote his novel, The Shining out of a personal simple phobia that he might harm his own kids. (Owing to his state of mind at that time.) Just because writers ain’t marching up and down blowing their own whistle doesn’t make their job any less quiet than the last minutes of new year’s eve.

The pen is louder than the boom of a nuke on impact. What’s more, the scenes are reenacted through all generations every time a reader cuts into the meat of the words. The power at the fingertips of a writer pushes the lip of eternity. Chew on that for a minute. And you might come to grasps with what could possibly be the greatest power available to wo/men on earth.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan