Eneh Akpan Writes

Friday, October 19, 2012

Who’s Calling The Shots?

Photo credit: sytereitz.com

We will grapple with opposition as long as there’s a world to occupy. But, tragedy is we often perceive the people (the bringers of bad luck) involved as challenges in themselves. That’s taking it a little too far, don’t you think?

You got it all wrong when you got your rage misplaced. ‘Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.’ (I think Maya Angelou said that.) The struggles you tackle are like chisels for carving masterpieces from artless rock. And the fools who bring ‘em are exactly that.

It’s to your credit to engage your dreams in the midst of raw opposition. There are times, it’s a natural response when you’re under heavy fire, you view your goals lurking on the other side of impossible. These are the moments you need to believe in the worth of your aspirations or you will get distracted. This is the primary objective of a conflict, what it drives for when it sneaks up on you. To steer your focus off your locus.

You ain’t going to remember pursuit of a vision when you’re way in over your head chasing after phantasmas. Turn the spotlight on bitterness for a minute. When bitterness trundles in a room with its crew, joy flies out the window. In the absence of joy and enthusiasm, your mission peels away in narrow strips in the ball of your fist.

Tons of experiences are chucked out when you waste your strength on people. Holding out under pressure opens you up to latent power, potentials buried deep within you. Like fuel to dying embers. It renews your faith in your dream.

Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Time wasted can never be regained?’ While you’re busy fighting people, opposition is taking bigger chunks of your time, poisoning your dream. To pay the cost, to be the boss, to be the one calling the shots, you need to stay on the grind.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

3 Tips on Developing a Relevant Writing Style

An understanding of your personality and true worth fuels your deepest capacities. It’s impossible to create knock-out write ups when you have not defined yourself for yourself. This is the concrete stuff you will present in your writing.

Write with every intention to communicate everything you stand for. Your art is the expression of the inner character. Therefore, to improve your flow, define a personal writing style and straddle your craft along that line.

For an artist to thrive in his work, he’s got to know who he is.

Where are you coming from?

What have you been through? Going through right now?

What is your outlook on life?

What is your mind state?

The slums/mansion you grew up in could be a ledge on which you project your trade. Again, it all boils down to your frame of mind. Look really deep within and touch things. Touch the individual waiting to be reaped like the wheat of harvest. This is where your experiences come into the picture. You’re never fully dressed for the job without one.

Define what you stand for. Study your history.

What do you believe about yourself, the world and its future?

What drives you? Motivates you?

Visualize and then congeal the things that describe you in your writing.

Do you stand for justice in the legal system;

Free education for ghetto children;

Better days on the streets;

An end to incessant domestic violence;

Waking the world up to the evil it willfully shuts its eyes to;

The love in a family or in relationships?

It’s time to take a stand so you can make a statement.

A lot of writers have sleepless nights trying to find a subject to write about. You might find your interest pushes you towards reading the papers. Don’t fight it.

In formulating a personal writing style, try to imagine the ideal life you want for yourself and the price you are willing to pay to possess it–What really matters to you?

What would you be doing with your life a few years from now?

How seriously do you want people to take you and the message of your stories?

If you make the decision to place your craft above every other thing, to make writing your medium for communicating to the world, your channel for expressing yourself, for changing lives, then what atcha write and the way atcha write it will come to you as naturally as sleep comes to a man trapped under the spell of Morpheus.

Your experience is the connect between becoming a fulfilled writer and discovery of a unique, personal and relevant writing style. Focus on these things, keep going over them in your mind, let them place you in your niche.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Monday, October 15, 2012

The Importance of Journaling

It would be a long time coming before tablet phones and notebooks take the place of traditional journaling.

Physical notebooks (compared to notebook apps) are practically indispensable. Your journal is where you live, where your writing–the skeletal impressions of a new idea begins to take shape. So, it ought to have a feel of home to your thoughts.

You won’t believe the speed at which thoughts vaporize. It’s only natural to grab for your notebook the moment an idea strikes a chord and jot it down. When you get home, you can go through your notes and see what’s worth developing. Many of your jots would be piecemeal but you’ll be amazed what the few that do work will turn into.

Creative thoughts are expensive and it’s careless to stow them away on the shelf of memory.

Committing thoughts to paper gives you a privilege you otherwise could not afford. The opportunity to view your ideas with your eyes, your physical eyes. Now, you can better work your way into the flow of the words and see where it leads. Your thoughts are way out there in the thick of the forest and tracking them down in your journal brings them home to you.

There’s always a chance to experiment with your ideas and imagination.

Ideas spring up every time seemingly, out of nowhere. Sometimes, it might be about a subject you’ve been meaning to rip apart and here you are in no man’s land with no way to get home (you’re not even certain you’ll remember when you do get home) on time and do your scribbling and you are stormed by a crazy bout of inspiration.

You won’t always have the luxury of paper towels to write on in an emergency and it’s possible to lose a brilliant idea without a notebook at hand.

Journaling is also about piling up intriguing stuff from your trips and saving interesting overheard conversations. It might even be the recording of a brilliant total recall of a past event, which you might improvise on at a later time in personal essays.

Notebooks are the best pals of serious writers. Never leave home without one.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Short Story: Best Route to Mastery of Fiction

‘Young writers shouldn’t kid themselves about learning to write. The best way to do that is to train yourself in the short story.’

– Ray Bradbury

Writing stories is the same as trying to create a universe off-the-cuff. The game of fiction writing can be a trifle seedy sometimes. What’s more? Plenty of times, a writer gets stuck in a work with a goodish length, loses the rhythm that set the story in motion in the first place and then quits, altogether.

Here’s a tip, if you’re new to fiction writing, the short story would be a good place to start. The reason is simple enough: a novel requires more energy and skill, more commitment and time. But a short story can help you get a taste of story structure.

A novel is a series of short stories lumped together to create a bigger piece of literature. Many things happen in a novel–many lives erupt and must settle into a rich and meaningful stew by the time the script arrives at the resolution. Only a writer drilled in the tool of fiction can achieve such feat.

‘A novel is like running a marathon. Would you run a marathon if you’d never successfully run around the block?’

– Steven Barnes

Nevertheless, the basic concept of story remains the same for both forms of fiction. Description, narrative, dialogue, character development and other intrinsic aspects of plot, which are curtailed in short fiction become magnified and refined in a longer project like a novel.

Photo credit: Flickr

You can better teach yourself the art and craft of story while experimenting with plot, dialogue, theme and character development if you exercise with the short fiction.

Without a foretaste of the shorts, you might very well quit half way through your novel manuscript. In point of fact, starting with a novel might be an excuse to avoid writing anything to completion.

You’ll learn greatly if you stick with short stories. Going for lengthy jobs like novels might mean setting yourself up for disappointments–you may come to despise fiction as a whole.

Save yourself the time and the trouble.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

What Will a Writing Career Add to Your Life?

Before taking up the call to live by the pen (which automatically sets you up to die by the pen), or if you already crossed that bridge but discovered that, by a stint of fate, the land of the imagination is sealed off by the Dragons of Self-Doubt, do a little turning inward.

What will a writing career add to your life?

A million writers will without a doubt, answer that question in a million different, unique ways. But it is a subject any wo/man who casts him/herself wholly into the waters of make-believe–to captain his/her ship must be prepared to deal with before taking the plunge.

Maybe You Seek:

The opportunity to explore a universe unknown which only writing (possibly, fiction) can bridge;

The rhythm that thrums and binds your passion for language;

The fulfillment derived from creating people–chimeras–like a magician pulls rabbits out of hats. Something people would come to adore or fear as real;

The thrill of scaring the heck out of folks or on the other hand, watching people’s faces lit up as a smile twitches a corner of their lips from reading one of your creations;

The pleasure of getting paid for doing something you love;

Or is it just the money? (I hope to God, it isn’t)

Photo credit: Flickr

It would benefit you greatly to set forth on a trip as thrilling and appalling as a career in writing with a destination and end-result in mind. You want to grab a jackhammer, the extra pack of ammo, your map. And don’t forget your binoculars.

I’m not trying to steal nobody’s life as a writer. But you need to know these things; Know why you’re a writer. Why you even bother to rise early to stare at a blank page or the bland whiteness of your PC. Why you tear out your hair and rave on and on and on about finding new ideas for writing.

Hey! Think about it. What’s in it for you?

Be Honest with Yourself

Rephrasing Stephen King,

‘Folks who practice this art honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death.’

Stop what you’re doing and look long and deep within you. Really ask yourself this question:

What will a writing career add to my life?

You might be amazed.

Let your pen bleed!

Akpan

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Anarchy on Wheels

Photo credit: Thecityfix.com

Lagos bus drivers (besides being speed daemons) have a hang for maneuvering their buses with one-half of the tires rolling on asphalt while the other half bumps along suspended on the shoulder (God knows why), which is often than not a mud-rid depression. I guess you could call it a variant of talent just as people have a talent for walking into doors. Trucking with these road hogs sometimes, leaves me in strange circumstances–getting stranded is just one chapter in that book.

“Hey, driver! Take it easy, will ya?” Somebody yells from behind me as the driver navigates the Nissan Urvan through a nasty ditch.

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” The driver turns around and the look on his face says he doesn’t know from Adam what the guy is talking about. “I’m trying to get you jerks to work as quickly as I possibly can and you dare run off your mouth at me?” He cusses a little to buttress his point.

“Just take it easy,” another passenger, a lady with a child in her laps, says.

“We want to get to work in one piece,” adds yet another passenger.

And that makes the driver really press the pedal to the metal. “If you want, I can drop you off right here.” Yet, he doesn’t ease up so they can get off. No one takes up his offer either.

And the tango between driver and passenger that has by some method become tradition in Lagos, Nigeria begins.

If the makers of the 007 films could tour the roads of Lagos, aboard public transport for a day, they would learn vital lessons from the real-life car chases Lagos commuters survive on a daily basis. The anarchy we have somehow, learned to live with. The bottleneck drama we have dubbed James Bond driving. There are other ways to live with knowledge.

Mornings arrive with a sour-sweet taste in my mouth. On one palate is the pleasure I derive as I write this in this vehicle (I’m doing this on my way to work), on the other–maybe, the hard palate–is the situation I described above. Every now and then, I feel my teeth rattle as the driver who finds it impossible to stay on his side of the road, dive-bombs a bump or a pothole. I pause my writing at this time and look up, tensed. When the coast clears (some come later than others), I continue to write.

The road to hell is paved not with adverbs or works in progress but with hunks of junks called Nissan Urvans. Especially, the fleet operated by Lagos commercial drivers. Nevertheless, as I stated earlier, there are other ways to live with knowledge. Sometimes, life gets in the way and ruffles up my affairs like my rides to work do. I continue to seek ways to put my talent to use.

The one thing, which abides always, always, always is that I continue to write. In some amusing way, I find opportunity poking out of life’s stack of slack like rabbits bending blades of giant grass to take in the scenery. And like the roads that get me to work, this place becomes more and more familiar to me even when my writing is 99% bilge and 1% slog. I continue to write because like my early morning bus rides, I can see my destination looming over the horizon like the big arc of a rising orange moon.

“Owa o!” I tell the driver as the bus bumps and bounces towards my stop. He doesn’t seem to hear me. I yell “Owa o!” a second time.

“Ibo lowa!” he says as if he’s totally ignorant of the Bus Stop. I tell him where I’m dropping off and the bus sputters and coughs and finally comes to a halt several meters beyond my stop.

I leap out of the vehicle and hurry to take my next ride–the last hell ride–that would finally get me to work. It appears to me I’m almost eager for the jittery ride through torture and all that’s life threatening. That I almost crave for it.

But I know better. It’s the chance to reach into the richness of my imagination that I long for; the beauty of finding creativity on these anarchy on wheels that calls out to me–seeks to possess all I have and am.

Yes, I know better. And it makes me unafraid.

Akpan

Thursday, October 4, 2012

5 Tips on Reading Like a Writer

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I have something for you. Especially, if you’re a writer but I guess any fervid reader might learn a few tricks from this post.

There is a world of difference between reading (despite the intensity of the reader) and reading like a writer. I know a lot of writers feel the same way, too. The tips which follow are not all there is about reading like a writer but they’ll suffice for now. For me, more than for you.

1. Live Inside the Story

This is an attempt to see the reader through your eyes as well as your senses. You’re learning how the reader is influenced by the printed page. Don’t act it. Really live in the pages and allow the words touch and move you until you hear the author’s pulse as the words pour through the windows of your eyes into your heart. Take the words through the follicles in your body.

2. Read with a Pencil Close By

If ‘Read a lot’ is the first part of the writer’s creed (The second part being Write a lot.), the writer ought to regard books as a student treats his/her textbooks. Underline words and phrases, which strike you as peculiar. Put a square around special words. Use curly brackets, asterisks, question marks, exclamation marks, any symbols that might aid sharp and brilliant recall in time of need.

The purpose of marking phrases or whole sentences and paragraphs is to help you find the appropriate words/phrases or paragraph during your writing period. It’s easy to identify a line or box standing in the middle of a page, to find the sentence it guards. Use highlighters and colored pencils/pen. Any word that kicks up your interest should be marked for further escapades.

3. Read between the Lines

Look beyond the obvious. Strip the words of contextual and metaphorical context and dig straight for the meat.’

Read guided by the simple but forceful truth: you are a writer. Make the words on the page appeal to you; listen to the author’s heartbeat as he speaks to you. Weigh each word on the scale of your emotion as the meaning slides home with an audible thump.

4. Add Your Own Words

Here’s one important reason you should have a pen or pencil beside you when you read.

Reading is a stimuli for creativity. A word, a phrase, an expression could spark a bust of inspiration and you would want to mark your place with… words. No other spot can serve that need like the space beside the words that initiated the inspiration.

Add your words to the ones already on the page; it will make you feel like you belong. The pages become less formal and more personal. To have your thoughts side by side, buttressing, explaining and magnifying the ones on the page gives the idea of everlastingness to the printed text. It keeps the memory of the experience fresh.

5. Observe the Writing Style

Ask yourself questions like, How would I write this, if given the opportunity? Or How would this look if I had penned it?

Be on the lookout for peculiar twists, things out of the way the author uses to achieve a particular effect.

Note the beginning, the middle (body, if nonfiction, rising action/climax, if fiction) and the landing of the story. We can always learn a thing or two from one another. Sometimes, it might be what not to do while writing in a particular field or genre.

What a writer needs to do above all else, is to live inside books. Read intensely and in every field there is. You need to be something of an expert at various times to write in a particular field.

So read. Let the words form pinions under you, fly you beyond the edge of reality until you tread unknown pastures, and smell the fragrance of the Shakespearean Rose.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan