Eneh Akpan Writes

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Walkin' Thro Walls

If, come tomorrow

I realize I ran my race in vain,

I’ll give no room in my heart to remorse.

I know I’ve been watchful

Threading in the prints of those who paved the way;

Experience has been my tutor and tool.

I guess it’s the one thing I’ll take with me to the grave.

I reserve no excuse

To present at the finish line;

I owe no man apologies

When I exit this timeline.

I believe in the dream

God programmed into me.

So, I ain’t runnin’ off

Beyond the limits of personal ingenuity;

I recognize my limitations.

If I fall

I’ll get right back up

And stand tall.

If His program walks me thro walls…

I’ll strap on my backpack and walk.

Akpan

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Bad Artists Copy. Good Artists Steal

It's possible to go on forever afflicting yourself trying to define a writing style appropriate to your taste. When you are new to a place, you are at best, a pawn of guesswork. And there's that old cliché . . . what cliché isn't? If seven hundred monkeys spent seven hundred years bashing away at seven hundred typewriters . . . What this boils down to is you are placed on the raw edge of panic thinking you could choke on the dirt of your own decision.

Stop! Before you work your passion to death and probably give it all up as a lost cause. You got leverage, 'cause you can tell yourself "this is who I want to be" and then identify people who have achieved similar things at high levels (Steven Barnes) and map your course on their example. A big chunk of the weight is thrown off your shoulders which saves you a whole lot of energy. And that's a LOT of energy!

Everyday you should expose yourself to the work and lives of those role models whose path you would like to emulate. Steven Barnes.

That's E-V-E-R-Y-D-A-Y. It would do you a whole world of good and buy you time to take in the sweeter details of life besides sitting in a corner worrying and scowling at your problems.

Here's a rule you will need to remember. This is serious; it's what you must do before picking a role model(s).

Define your goals.

A map is nothing but a piece of trash if you can't name your street. You can be in the neck of the woods and still be at sea with an atlas in your back pocket. And it's all role models are meant to be. Maps not a destination. A pointer to where you want to be.

Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters. Michael Moorcock.

Why do you suppose your role models look like you a few years from here? 'Cause they have (still are) gone through what you will go through. It is an inexorable truth. You would get there a lot sooner if you trained your heart to listen for footfalls of legends on the same wave length with you. Going after it with wit and care of a person crossing a stream on a bridge of scattered rocks.

Someday, you might make a visit to the halls of memory and finding the points of change crack open the husk of Picasso's legend: Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. In copying Picasso implies plagiarism in which the author is not credited. And in stealing . . . Well, that's our game plan. It's exactly what we're working with. Some of my role models are, Stephen King, Maya Angelou and Steven Barnes. I'm not going to lie and claim I got here all by myself because I did not.

And there you are working yourself into worsted yarn when you have been issued a license to steal. An educated paparazzo never got anybody jailed.

Let your pen keep bleeding!

Eneh

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Twenty Tools for Fiction Writing (Part Two)

Here we go with the second and last part of this great adventure. I hope you had a terrific moment the last time, cause I sure did. Sometimes, you don’t need people to hit you upside your bingo with a hammer. Often a word or two of advice is enough to set you off reproducing literary children like a geyser in full swing.

That’s precisely why I'm doing this. Twenty successful writers digging into their pretty-stocked archives of experience and sharing their finds in succinct and well thought-out manner.

May we thread in their footsteps!

1. The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

– Maya Angelou

2. The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

– Thomas Harris

3. A writer is someone who has written something today.

– J. A. Jance

4. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

– Stephenie Meyer

5. When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.

– James Patterson

6. There isn’t time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

— Natalie Goldberg

7. Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

– Dean Koontz

8. Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

– Mark Twain

9. Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

– Michael Crichton

10. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns funny. But once you know how, you can write in any area.

– John D. MacDonald

Keep that pen of yours bleeding.

Akpan

Twenty Tools for Fiction Writing (Part One)

Many accomplished writers have dropped a word or two on how to succeed in fiction writing. It’s something which every writer can glean a nugget or two from. I didn’t want to gild the lily I’d rather you try and figure out their messages for yourself.

There are about ten quotes delivered raw here on the craft of fiction writing. The part two follows shortly.

Enjoy!

1. You have to write a lot of fiction, if you want to be a fiction writer.

– Stephen King

2. All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

– Ray Bradbury

3. Any skill you wish to master must be addressed every day. Even if you don’t spend a huge amount of time at it.

– Steven Barnes.

4. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

– Neil Gaiman

5. Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if ‘X’ happened? That’s how you start.

— Tom Clancy

6. What a writer has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

— Ernest Hemingway

7. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.

– Elmore Leonard

8. Focus on the story first. Ask yourself, ‘Will other people find this story so interesting that they will tell others about it?’ –

Nicholas Sparks

9. Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

– Geoff Dyer

10. Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

– PD James

Hope you learned a lot from these words. Stay tuned for the part two coming right atcha.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Lil' Bit of Hope

With a lil’ bit of hope

I’ll sail a battered ship home;

I’ll pull a VLCC to the shore;

And explore the earth to the very core.

Even if the circumstance roars at me

Like a wild beast,

Lashing out with the claws of defeat,

I will snatch the substance of triumph

Like a shepherd fetching lost sheep

From the den of a stoned lion.

I have molded and forged decision

Working at it with a surgeon’s precision.

As inevitable as a true prophecy;

I pursue my course on unalloyed jealousy.

‘Cause in these times

It’s impossible for me to fail;

At the height of my tides

It’s luxury to be frail.

I can almost touch inspiration

As it washes over me like an unction;

Stripped to the barest minimum

Makes me enough.

Akpan

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The novel is based on the true story of an American woman who died from cervical cancer on October 4, 1951, at 12:30 A.M. at the age of thirty-one .

The cells from Henrietta's tumor were given to researcher George Gey (for further research) by the doctor treating her for cancer. Gey "discovered that [Henrietta's] cells did something they'd never seen before: They could be kept alive and grow." Cells cultured from other cells only survived for a few days. Gey multiplied the cells and started a cell line, he named the cells HeLa.

By 1954, the HeLa strain of cells was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. To test Salk's new vaccine, the cells were quickly put into mass production in the first-ever cell production factory.

Buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery in Lackstown, Virginia, Henrietta's exact burial location is unknown.

Yet, she lives immortal.

Source: Wikipedia

Akpan

Monday, November 8, 2010

Your Story Needs You

Ever heard of NaNoWriMo?

Maybe? Maybe not? Well, just in case you haven't. Don't let the strange term bother you. NaNoWriMo stands for 'National Novel Writing Month'. NaNo's a special kind of exercise; a writing spree of sorts. Millions of writers from around the globe are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days! It's an exceptional privilege for writers of all skill levels to explore their particulars. And it comes up only once in a year from the 1^st of November to 30^th!

Am I saying it's going on right now? Of course, and you can log on to www.nanowrimo.org and treat yourself to a variety of genres and bestsellers-in-the-making. Then again, you would be right on top of it like a hat if you stopped by www.writing.com. You could even help these burgeoning authors by dropping a critique or two. Feedbacks are diamonds. Plus, you could be encouraging the next Stephen King or Maya Angelou!

No gig's as uplifting as a little push to spur us on in the upward pull to the peak.

Maybe, it's your first time of learning about NaNo. So you missed out on it this year. So, you feel you ain't totally up to it just yet. Wanna do a little something worthwhile in the meanwhile?

Get your writing tools out. You got the next 365 days to get your juices fired up and your senses engaged. You can charge yourself up and be all set for next year's NaNo by starting off with short stories. Write a story a week or every other week. A 2000 word story a week will earn you 100,000 words come November 2011!

2000 word stories a week may look a little ambitious for you and you may not be particularly prepared for such escapades. You might want to settle for a 200 – 500 word shorts. Look's like a plan. The point is to get yourself ablaze and burning for the greatest event on planet earth every budding writer looks forward to or should once he gets in on it.

Writing stories, especially on the scale we are talking about requires the aid of writing prompts. You may have websites where you fetch yours. If you don't, www.writing.com has a link pointing to www.writingprompts.com, tons of ideas to set up for beautiful plots. And then, there's www.writersdigest.com there's practically hundreds of prompts doled out every week and they also have spots where you could post stories created from these prompts and get immediate reviews from fellow writers.

The list goes on. Hundreds of sites are out there on the www, all offering tips and prompts that could spark good stories. All you have to do is google the words, 'writing prompts'. Relax, and let your search engine go to work. You'll be amazed at the results coughed up.

(Stephen) King's formula for learning to write well is: "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer." He sets out each day with a quota of 2000 words and will not stop writing until it is met. www.wikipedia.org

And now writer, as they say in NaNoWrimo, your story needs you.

Eneh