Dear (Nigerian) Writer, You Will Suffer

You started this journey some odd fifteen years ago. Back then, you were in Primary Three Orange. Writing held so much wonder for you. As you lay on the soft rug in your father’s sitting room, scribbling stories about princesses, magical eggs, mystical journeys, and ojuju calabars, you were transported to many realities.

And when you were not writing, you consumed books by Enid Blyton, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lantern and Moorhen Publishing house like your life depended on it.

Words like burnout and writer’s block were unfamiliar to you for your ideas came in a steady and strong stream. Back then, when you and Kosi Nwagbo used to write and illustrate stories about everything under the earth, nothing mattered except the story on paper.

It didn’t matter if they seemed too real or too fake; what mattered was they gave you joy.
It didn’t matter if they had been told before; you always gave them your own twist.
It didn’t matter if you were telling not showing or showing not telling; you knew what you wanted to show and your words told that story beautifully.

Writing came easily to you; you didn’t have to force it. Like water spilling over a polished table, the words flowed from your mind onto paper. So it came as no surprise when you decided to be a writer. The universe accepted it in that quiet way it accepts things that are meant to be. You were happy. Everyone was happy. This is going to be a piece of cake, right?

Life: (rolls up sleeves) LOL, hold my drink, sweetheart.

Fifteen years later, you are frantically typing on a new, small, temperamental laptop, trying to meet a deadline. The ceiling fan groans with each turn, a mournful soundtrack to your distracted thoughts. You wonder when exactly it all went to shit.

If only seven-year-old you could see you now!

You still haven’t hit your big break.
You are still as broke as shattered glass.
You are still taking gigs that pay the handsome rate of one naira per word.
You are still sharing links to your work on WhatsApp, pleading for views but silently knowing less than three percent of your friends would view it.
Your laptop which had become a friend of sorts, was stolen from you
You didn’t know what the next eleven months had in store for you
And to top it all off, the odamn laptop keys were malfunctionin!
It was safe to say life had shown you pepper.

On reading Sidney Sheldon’s “A Stranger in the Mirror”, you bonded so deeply with the main character, Toby Templerhaus. His determination to succeed mirrored yours. Just as he took shitty gigs and performed at run-down bars, you took shitty gigs that paid in “exposure” and what-the-fuck-esque rates that vanished as quickly as they came.
The years were not kind to you. Life rolled up its sleeves and pummeled you deep into the dust, leaving you aching emotionally, psychologically, and physically. Pains became the very structure of your back, thanks to long hours spent writing for crummy jobs or for stories that got more rejections than the class nerd.

With writing competitions, you were a one-hit-wonder; you only won one, and that was it. But you were hopeful. The river you would drink from would not pass you by.

However, as you watched numerous competitions saunter by and got those perky, placating rejection mails, you became unsure. There is this pain that comes from losing something that you never had, something that by right should be yours. You knew this pain intimately. You felt it each time you saw the competition’s short and long lists. As you read the “winning stories” you felt different emotions. Anger rose like bile in your throat and sadness engulfed your being, but it was always contempt that won.
“What the hell is this? My works are better than these na.”
But even as you said it, you were not sure. At that point, your writing gained a certain fluidity. You began to contaminate your characters and bend your words and plot to suit what you felt the competition organizers needed to read. At that moment, writing, which was initially a friend and a means of expressing realities you saw in your mind’s eye, became something you detested: a chore. You carried on like this for a while till it became unbearable and you stopped writing for competitions. You were tired of watering down your soul.

You continued writing, but this time you stayed true to yourself and your soul. You realized art is subjective and, just like that little girl 15 years ago, you have to like what you write. Everyone else’s opinion was frankly secondary. Sometimes, this worked and other times, it failed abysmally. Your family didn’t help matters. Of course, they liked how refined it was that one of their own was a writer, but their actions and words pointed to the fact that they saw it as a hobby you took too seriously.

So my dear, writing, especially in Nigeria’s unique clime, is no funny business. Here, zero shits are given to your little beginnings and your becoming story if they don’t come with a “become-d” reality. So until you become a big name in the community, after penning your story in as flowery a way as you can manage, you have to plead with people to read it. You have to convince publishing houses that within that innocuous-looking document typed in font 12 times new roman is a masterpiece.

Somewhere between all these pleas and rejections that are certain to come, you will come to doubt the fire in your hands. At this point, you will doubt the uniqueness of your voice and question if what you have to say was important. You will wake up unmotivated, drag through your day, stare at your recent manuscript for good measure and find it wanting and go to sleep unfulfilled. You will get yet another mail from one of the jobs you applied for, only to discover it is from a burgeoning/nascent/new/growing platform/blog/news site that expects you to double as a writer, proofreader, social media manager, and graphic designer while paying in peanuts and cowries.

In this business of writing, dear writer, you will see pepper in more ways than one.
You will blame yourself, life, village people, time, the internet, the writing process, made authors, and those employers of yours.
You will meet walls and writer’s blocks
Your ink will sputter and you will come to hate those pages that once gave you joy

You will come to avoid and loathe the blank, taunting stare of your laptop screen as you put off yet another day of writing.
You will meet people who belittle all the work you do and people who think your worth as a writer lies in your (in)ability to construct love messages for their WhatsApp love interests and catchy messages for their relatives and friends
You will hate writing and consider taking up something else like accounting, data analysis, or something a la mode like programming but you will continue- you should continue
You will see pepper in more ways than one but I do hope you will stand the heat; I pray it gives more fire to your ink.

Originally published on Medium.

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