‘My Writing Goal This Year Is to Follow My Creative Curiosities’

First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.

Our questions are italicized.

Growing up, I read everything I could find—books from the Lantern series that my mother bought me, Maltina comics, legal thrillers by John Grisham as well as adventure novels my uncle lent me. I also read a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that I salvaged from my neighbour’s pile (he was throwing things out, and the book was missing a few pages). In secondary school, I found that I loved history, and I read anything that caught my fancy from the library’s collection. In class, we read Chinua Achebe, D. Olu Olagoke, Ola Rotimi, Peter Abrams, Richard Wright. In SS 1, my dad bought all my literature and history texts—twice! This was because my school set coincided with the period when they were combining the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) syllabi, which only became clear after resumption, when my dad had bought the texts for just one syllabus. I read them all, some before the long vacation was over: Black Boy by Richard Wright; Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice from a collection of William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets; Arms and the Man by Benard Shaw and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. There was also George Eliot’s Silas Marner, which I read on and off for a few years, completing it after I had gone to university. I can still remember the man and his loom, his secret pot of gold, his loneliness and solitude.

They are too many to remember.

I would say that Marilynne Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? is not so much changing my mind as allowing me to accept more the part of me—which I sometimes resist, ha!—that is in tune with the divine.

It is a mix of both. I, however, make a habit of continuation, only seldom going back to already-written sections in a bid to edit stuff. I read and tweak the last few paragraphs of whatever had been done before, then try to proceed from there. I do put some pressure on my sentences at the initial moment of generating text, focusing on clarity. This, I think, is largely because I enjoy reading what I have written at the end of the writing day, and so if the language does not sound ‘sweet’ to me, I cut that section out and paste it into a separate document, which I often repurpose for something else or for a different section of the same piece.