Eneh Akpan Writes

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Why Fantasy Holds The World Spellbound

Fantasy has a come long way and deserves the worldwide acclaim it seems to have accomplished. Burrowing its roots deep into the fabric of fairytales, myths and legends, the genre has exploded into mainstream literature and film and garnered worldwide appeal among fans from diverse walks of life.

It's likely no other genre or subgenre (since fantasy is by right a sub of a larger genre called speculative fiction) has even come close to attaining fantasy's level of success. A genre which has garnered fans from people encompassing all age groups.

What's more amazing is the genre's ability to stimulate interest across a multicultural threshold and sustain an appeal that stretches beyond and even obliterates the generational borderline. The generation in question transcends age to gender to time and space.

Photo: offsidewallpapers.blogspot.com

One assumes this level of achievement is possible largely on the basis that fantasy usually creates its own world and its own setting which somehow makes its plots not dated. The idea of a fantasy world gives the genre an edge. Although, we exist in a constantly evolving universe the plots of fantasy stories are allowed to maintain their original state and are controlled by their own peculiar (magical) laws.

Fantasy as a form of literature can be compared to the hip hop genre of pop music. In recent time, the music genre has pretty much infiltrated the camp of every other form of music. Today, there's hip hop gospel, hip hop soul, hip hop jazz, hip hop reggae, hip hop dancehall, hip hop whatever (that's not any type of music I know of). There's even a blend of hip hop called Naija hip hop-which is a fusion of Nigerian indigenous music with elements of hip hop. Fantasy takes every other genre in its stride. Take a look at some of the subgenres spurned from this fantastical art.

Fantasy Subgenres:
By Theme: Comic fantasy, Dark fantasy, Contemporary fantasy, Heroic fantasy, Magic realism, Fantasy of manners, Mythic, Paranormal fantasy, Superhero fantasy, Sword and sorcery;

By setting: Epic/High fantasy, Low fantasy, Hard fantasy, Historical fantasy, Prehistoric fantasy, Medieval fantasy, Wuxia, Urban fantasy, Paranormal romance;

And by extension, Science fantasy, Juvenile fantasy, Romantic fantasy.
Courtesy: Wikipedia

One would suppose a form of storytelling with themes and basic elements which are offshoot of folktales and myths should have such impact on both the worlds of film and literature. I mean its like growing up with MJ. You came into this world (If you're like me) to witness young MJ as a superstar, you grew up with MJ still doing his thing and wham! you're on your own footing the bills and MJ (who is not so young anymore) is still THERE doing his thing. I mean, he's gone now but you do get the picture, do you not? You don't expect an artist born yesterday to take the floor from an icon attached to your earliest memory of music.

Photo: fanpop.com

Fantasy fiction is a little bit like that. A lot of grown ups bought Disney's Cinderella on the pretext it was for the kids (yeah, the kids, right). But deep within us all was a secret longing to see just how close to papa's description of Cinderella Disney's version really was. The basic ingredients of the fairytale: heroic children, ladies-in-distress, mythic creatures like dragons and the like, also make up the plots of tales of the fantastical. Plus, fantasy stories like the Arabian lit, A Thousand and One Nights guarantee that the genre will always have that multicultural appeal.

Fantasy has been around for quite awhile and without any doubt, is one of the first form of literature. The genre's constant rising popularity is a pointer that fantasy will forever have this world under its spell.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Friday, January 11, 2013

Grub

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. He wins the battle and the poem's about his victory.

Photo credit: marvinleblanc.com

He said I couldn't make it,

He said he was me and he's weak.

But he was wrong,

Trying to seduce me to grub.

Watch me step on a pedestal and feel the storm cease;

I am the lyric of the silence of the seas.

I'm fly on the side, I'll get mine, if you please.

Step up to a fight and not back down on my knees.

The winds oppose me but my faith ain't my feelings.

My mind roars with panic still ama rake in the winnings.

No tripping. I'm repping new beginnings

I steer my course on the strength of immutable things.

He said I couldn't make it,

He said he was me and he's weak.

But oh, boy was he wrong,

Trying to seduce me to grub.

I know all about losses; I know the pain that gives on gain,
And when I chance that river, things ain't gon' be the same.
I hear your voices but it only makes me wanta breathe again.
Thoughts can't pull me down unless I consent to the bargain.
I lift up my head and savor the freshness of the rain
And dance into a strong morning light that calms my strain.
You know joy when you see it, can't kill it. It can't be feigned.
So, hear me say ama get it. Heed. Cause my eyes are trained.

  He said I couldn't make it,

Inner critic said he's me and he's weak.

But oh, boy was he wrong, (cause I'm strong)

Trying to seduce me to grub.

Akpan

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Things We Lost In The Fire

A Poetic Essay

Photo: colourbox.com

We grope in darkness and call out for light only to get answered by strife.

It's not unheard of old aches returning to taunt fairly healed scars. Sometimes, Fate could be that absurd. But that's just the way it is, lifting the songwriter's words.

History cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage needs not be relived again. - Maya Angelou.

And it's been said, the past makes us what we are. (I think I heard that in a Jet Li flick) But how do we erase the marks of the scar?

Mistakes are the bane of our existence and extremely unavoidable. Still, the greatest glory in living is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall. - Mandela

A dream deferred could provoke the greatest pain ever discovered especially, a dream rooted in the most sensitive spot in your heart. The adversities that engage us and almost rip us apart beyond repair hold within 'em the seed of our ressurection.

It's impossible not to feel injured when all you hoped to achieve shipwreck inches from the shoreline.

Some come out of the fire, squeak and clean, others just crash and burn still, some step out unscathed but lose everything they invested an entire life to build to the fire.

The pains uncovered are the footprints of unfulfilled dreams; the agonies of darkness visible; the frustrating emptiness of might-have-beens.

We grasp for a reality that blurs into fantasy before our very eyes; to substance swallowed up within a shadow and step out to face the days of our lives in defeat. At this point, the soul is deprived of every single reason to wrestle annihilation. Time crawls, eternity speeds along and life through your bloodshot eyes is a blur of rage.

We are made to concede defeat; made aware that some of the stuff we lost will never be regained-a loved one, opportunity to go to college, friendship that never was and prospects that fizzled away on the fringes of dawn. But the glory of life is not in recapping a trove of hurtful memories but in purifying them to the point that they act as catalysts to personal excellence.

Life, living, must be perceived as one constant sacrifice. And that gives the impression that at some stages in life one must be willing to let go of something, (precious, yes! But that's the point of sacrifices, isn't it?) to offer up something in the game of life.

Things that we lost to the fires of desire often help us, drive us to the limits of our genius. And concealed in the disguise of pain are the blessings of sacrifice!

Akpan

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

25 Stephen-King-Sunset-Scenes

I'm reading a Stephen King collection called Just After Sunset. And the title got me thinking about King's fascination with the night, moonlight and, sunsets. That got me started and I thought I'd go through a bit of his stories and create an article like the one you're reading.

Night came on and the stars unrolled across the sky from east to west like a rug with spangles in it. A half-moon rose between two peaks and sat there, casting a sickroom glow over this stretch of the highway and the open land on both sides of it.

Just After Sunset (Willa)

Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket.

Bag of Bones

The wind held long conversations with the gutters. A rind of white spring moon rose in the sky. Somewhere far away, in some still meadow of night or along some pine-edged corridor of forest, a dog barked furiously and then fell silent.

Cujo

The moon peered in Tad's window like the white and slitted eye of a dead man.

Cujo

The evening seemed to go on forever, the light bleeding slowly out of the sky as the sun made its exit beyond the mountains on the western side of the lake, the mountains that marched off to join the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's chimney.

The Dark Half

The sun went down, and what was left of the day was a white line painted on the western horizon. It looked no thicker than the white stripe painted down the center of the highway. That would be gone soon enough. Crickets sang in the high grass to the right of the driveway, making a mindlessly cheerful rickety-rickety sound.

Cujo

The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked to her like a basketball that had been dipped in blood.

Cujo

The sun had made its, exit, leaving a still but somehow crazed yellow light over the fields. Somewhere a bird sang, stopped, then sang again.

Cujo

The crickets sang, as they had in my dreams, and the trees huddled close on either side of the lane, as they always did in my dreams. Overhead, the sky was a fading strip of blue.

Bag of Bones

What's left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.

Bag of Bones

What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step. It is here; you slip across it on a kind of breathless curve like a skater turning for home.

Bag of Bones

At one moment there was only the fading sky (with indigo just starting to rise up from the edges like an infusion of ink), and at the next Venus was glowing there, bright and steady.

Bag of Bones

The sunset was fading to a baleful afterglow. The sky in the west looked like the white of a bloodshot eye.

Bag of Bones

Out there to her left, the sun was a small orange-yellow coin peering dully.

Just After Sunset (The Gingerbread Girl)

The sun was a deepening orange, kindling the western horizon. Soon the horizon would catch fire.

Just After Sunset (The Gingerbread Girl)

The dregs of sunset faded to bitter orange over the Wind River Range.

Just After Sunset (N.)

As if everything would stay the way it was forever, with sunset not more than forty minutes away and the sun sitting red over the horizon and that faded clarity in the air.

Just After Sunset (N.)

A brilliant white cres-cent of moon rode low in it, seeming almost to be impaled on a sharp devil's prong of rock jutting from the east side of the China Pit.

Desperation

The thunderheads were darker, higher, and the water looked angry and implacable under their shadow and the reflected glow of the sunset.

Night Shift (I Am the Doorway)

The clouds had blottered the red remnants of the sunset, and the dunes were dark and shadow-cast. The clouds raced and boiled above us.

Night Shift (I Am the Doorway)

To the left the sun was going down in bloody glory. Straight ahead and across the water, the thunderclouds were beating their way towards us. Lightning forked at the water.

Night Shift (I Am the Doorway)

The moon has risen over the sea, bloated, full, the color of blood, staining the ocean with a noxious shade.

Night Shift (Jerusalem’s Lot)

The moonlight stitched inky crescent-shaped shadows and folds across everything.

Night Shift (Night Surf)

Sometimes it seems to me that my clearest memories of Duma Key are of orange evening skies that bleed at the bottom and fade away at the top, green to black.

Duma Key

In that dream and all the ones which followed, it was always sunset. Vast red light filled the west, reaching high to heaven, where it faded first to orange, then to a weird green. The Gulf was nearly dead calm, with only the smallest and glassiest of rollers crossing its surface like respiration. In the reflected sunset glare, it looked like a huge socket filled with blood.

Duma Key

Akpan

Sunday, January 6, 2013

5 Ways to Tell Your Art Will Sell

No one can guarantee you will meet success in a particular field.

Photo: berightback.nl

It's probably, okay to have somebody to talk to when walking that sensitive path towards choosing a lifelong career. They might even point you to what you're good at or better off doing. But you will still have to battle the question of whether or not people will buy into your idea, your talent or your craft-whatever road your heart is bent on traveling.

These 5 steps are not exactly open sesames but they might get you started and guide you in making the right decision. The following points are not arranged in any particular order.

Study the Market

Except you do not intend to have a career that puts bread on your table and a roof over your head, you need to have a feel for what the market wants. The literary taste buds of an audience alters one generation to the next. Today's readers might be easily thrown off by Lovecraft's style of writing and without argument, balk at Shakespearean literature. The publishing business is a rapidly evolving industry and you have to keep up with the shifts if you don't want to be left behind.

Get a Role Model

This step is absolutely necessary. If you have somebody going up ahead of you, somebody who's impressed bold footprints in the sands of time by calling up all his experience-forged resourcefulness, you got leverage. There's a very strong chance you would meet with less frustration than you would going it alone on the long and winding road of your calling without a role model.

Do the thing You Love and are Passionate About

After all is said and done, your choice of career should be the craft you've fallen head over heels for. It should be art and it must give you style and class-a level of dignity that presents the real you as you are to your world. Art must be self-expression or it is not. Who you decide to be recognized as and What you choose to be identified with must be a medium through which you can channel your passion. Everything else must come after. Make no bones about it.

If You Got It Flaunt It

In doing our best and thrusting ourselves wholly and in complete abandon into our chosen field we get a foretaste of who/what we seek to become. This is what's required if we must settle all manner of doubts in our minds. If you are a writer, you can effectively prove a genre is appropriate for you when you immerse yourself into writing a lot of fiction in your pet genre. Do it over and over again, when you feel like it and (ideally) when you don't feel anything like it. Bury yourself totally in your work and let it define and recreate you.

Stay On Your Grind

Fans need you to establish you are not going to put an egg in your shoe and beat it just when they're just beginning to feel your vibe. You need to bring persistence to bear and demonstrate to your readers that you can adapt (there's the word I've been meaning to get at) to the swings and shifts in the industry. That you can stand true and withstand the test of time.

There it is. It's not magic but at least you got a a fighting chance of being sure you're headed in the right direction, to even know there is a direction. You possess an opportunity to perfect by pruning or polishing, your craft and discover what else needs to be done before you are ready to take over the world.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Saturday, January 5, 2013

The Dark Fascinates the Writers of Horror

The fictional character James Lowry encounters...

Photo: Wikipedia

Darkness commands its own peculiar kind of emotion: fear and awe.

Writers of the shock/suspense genre have harnessed this natural process and resource through all ages and generation. The dark seems to be a staple of the horror genre. Yet, we know it's not every scene in a story meant to terrify us that happens in the dark. There are frankly, quite a few stories which take place in the light that send the chill down our spines faster than would have been the case if the event occurred in a dimly-lit alley.

Men and women called into the ministry of fear understand people's reservations about dark, lonely places especially, the spots that have been deserted for quite a while. Such places bypass our rational minds and cry out to our subconscious with tales often difficult to believe but impossible to push to the back burner.

First, there is Fear of the Unknown, this is possibly the strongest case a horror writer can present for attaching so much importance to the dark. In moments of high-octane version of terror, a crumpled jacket lying on the floor of the closet could bear a really strong resemblance to the baby, dead and motionless or to some colossal creeping shadow that's waiting for the right moment to pounce on a victim and cause unthinkable harm.

The Element of Surprise is another very strong case. In the dark, nothing is what it seems. The writer of horror can manipulate the mind of his character(s) and reader(s) to believe one thing is really going on while in matter of fact, the reverse is the case (whatever the reverse might be).

"If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it." (italics mine)
Stephen King,

Danse Macabre

All in all, it is the idea, I call it the general phobia we all reserve in our deep subconscious for the dark that fuels the drama in the horror genre. Writers in this genre seem to have their fingers on the stuff that freezes our breath in our lungs and stops our heartbeats if only, for a fraction of a second.

Think of all the dreadful places thoughts of the dark dredge up in your mind-places like the inside of a closed coffin, the bottom of a well, the depths of the dungeon, the inside of a cave, blindness, the inside of a closet, the closed boot of a car, the depths of the ocean, the basement, concussion, coma, death. Is it a wonder we consider evil a dark matter? We even believe painful memories are stashed away in the dark places of our psyche.

The dark (be it in our minds or outside of it) is a world, a universe on its own and it never comes without its magic and do not forget, its box of misery.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan