Writing Advice from Ellen Banda-Aaku and Helon Habila for The Kwani? Manuscript Project
Ellen Banda-Aaku, author of Patchwork, and Helon Habila, editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story and author of Oil on Water, have contributed the final pieces in a series on writing advice that Kwani? has been publishing in the run up to their Manuscript Project submission deadline on 17 September.
The first in the series was written by The Memory of Love author, Aminatta Forna, and the second was by Leila Aboulela, author of Lyrics Alley. The Kwani? Manuscript Project is looking for up and coming African writers and this series aims to facilitate and help them during the writing process:
Kwani Trust’s literary prize for African writing is a great incentive to start writing that story that has been growing in your head for years now or to pull out that work in progress novel. Bear in mind that a manuscript submitted to a literary prize actually gets read – in order to select a winner – whereas there is no guarantee that a manuscript sent to a publisher will be read.
So start writing!
While putting a novel together in less than two months may seem daunting it can be done with lots of determination, meticulous planning, and many hours sat at a computer.
Part 1: Giving Shape to One’s Universe
I wrote most of my first novel, Waiting for an Angel, in Lagos, Nigeria, and if you have been to Lagos the fractured, discontinuous style of the narration would make sense to you immediately. Lagos in the 1990s, under the military dictatorship, was a large, sprawling suburb of hell – this is not an exaggeration. There were dead bodies lying for days by the roadside; there were traffic jams that went on for hours trapping you in old, overcrowded molue buses, pinned between sweaty bodies as you hung on to the top railing for balance with one hand and with the other hand you held on tightly to your wallet. Do I need to mention that when you finally got home from work, sometimes around 9 pm, it was guaranteed that there would be no electricity? In my particular neighbourhood of Ketu we had had no power for months, at exactly the time I was writing my novel. Chinua Achebe, asked at a reading to say something about Lagos, said that his only advice to anyone who found himself in Lagos was to get out as soon as he could.
Book details
- Patchwork by Ellen Banda-Aaku
Book homepage
EAN: 9780143527534
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- The Granta Book of the African Short Story edited by Helon Habila
EAN: 9781847082473
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- Oil on Water by Helon Habila
EAN: 9780393339642
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Apr
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