RAJAB 21, 1429 A.H.
THURSDAY JULY 24 2008
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Are writers born or made? (I)
By Dimgba Igwe
dimgba@sunnewsonline.com
Recently, I was asked to speak at a Christian writers’ workshop on whether creative writers are born or made. (The workshops are periodically put together by Dr. J.J. Phillips who wants to stimulate Christians into becoming effective communicators through their literary skills.) In other words, is writing skill a matter of natural talent, a fruit of training or a combination of the two? That gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I consider a useful postscript to my forthcoming book, Advanced Features: Writing Successful Articles, now being printed.
Another book so soon after the hoopla about Nigerian Marketing Memoirs is yet to die down? Well, it was a book written years ago, 1993/4 to be precise, but whose manuscript was fished out and so many esteemed individuals who read it felt it must be published. Dr. Rueben Abati of The Guardian did not only read it, but also suggested that I add a postscript.
More importantly, there are many people out there who need some guide into how to become writers—creative writers or media writing. Do they have a chance? What does it take to become a journalist? Is it compulsory that you must study mass communication to become a good journalist? Can you make it as a creative writer if you didn’t major in arts? Most journalists and writers must have come across similar questions and many more. This is only an attempt to grapple at some aspects of this broad subject.
In 1961, Cyprian Ekwensi wrote one of his most popular novels, Jagua Nana, reportedly in all of two weeks! On the other hand, Chinua Achebe, who is considered Africa’s greatest novelist, has written a total of six novels, a collection of poems and three books of essays in his nearly 50 years of writing career.
If we want to be mathematical about it, we would say that Achebe’s books come at an average time span of five years per book! Compare that with Ekwensi’s two weeks for an equally classic novel!
On the other hand, Gabriel Okara, 2005 joint winner of the prestigious NLNG Literary Prize for Literature, has written only one novel—The Voice—for which he is famous and a collection of poems (The Fisherman’s Invocations) and two children books, all in a span of nearly half a century too.
In the international scene, one of the world’s most prolific authors, Agatha Christie, I hope, who had churned out 93 thrillers in under 40 years, said two or three weeks were enough for her to be done with a novel. As a matter of fact, she did some novels in ten days. And to think that in her twilight years, she simply dictated her stories to a secretary to capture in a written form!
Alfred Hitchcock and James Hadley Chase, with over a hundred novels and screenplays to their credit, held the world spellbound, even after they were gone.
The old Soviet writers like Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, etc. churned out their classics at times from dingy prison cells.
The Apostle Paul was called by Jesus to take the gospel to the Gentiles but he ended up writing more than half of the New Testament, making you wonder if writing was part of his calling or one of the courses he took under Gamaliel, his famous tutor. Why was Kenneth Hagen able to write so many books while so busy in a very successful ministry? How come David Oyedepo, an architect, running one of Africa’s most successful ministries, is also churning out many books?
Are there any discernible strands to all these jumble of writers of different era, theme, style and background?
On the other hand, are these celebrated writers born creative writers or made? That is the difficult task you’ve asked me to speak on.
My people say that if you listen carefully, you will hear the footsteps of ants. So, I am persuaded that there are some lessons we can glean from exploring the experiences of any or all of these writers.
The first and immediate lesson is that the creative impulse that gives birth to writing is open to people of diverse background, training, motivation, passion, discipline, gift and creativity.
Cyprian Ekwensi is a pharmacist, whereas Achebe, JP Clark and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka majored in arts—English, literature and drama.
It is in fact, instructive that T.M. Aluko, one of Nigeria’s well-known writers, is an engineer. The Apostle Paul, of course, is a lawyer, an ex-religious agitator, an evangelist, pastor, teacher and a scholar. The Apostle Luke, on the other hand, is a doctor with keen interest in historical chronicles.
But, there is also a commonality to all of them—the compulsion to write. You may be born with creative imagination, which may fuel a compulsion to write.
You are lucky if you are one of those so gifted—but don’t roll out the drums yet to celebrate your arrival as a writer. How do you reduce your message, impulse or ideas into a piece of readable writing? Some have great stories to tell but lack the skill to render them with the desired rhetorical ease, depth and impact. This may ultimately defeat the message.
This then leads us to an inevitable conclusion: creativity may be in-born but writing skills are learned.
Yes, you guessed right—I am separating raw creativity from the technical skill needed to harness it. One of the world’s most famous publishers, Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the world famous Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York city, brought great insight into this issue when he observed that there is no position that does not require some training to attain mastery.
He observed:
“The only position that occurs to me that a man in our Republic can successfully fill by the simple fact of birth is that of an idiot. Is there any position for which a man does not demand and receive training—training at home, training in schools and colleges, training by master craftsmen, or training through bitter experience—through the burns that make the child dread the fire, through blunders costly to the aspirant?
“The ‘born editor’ who has succeeded greatly without special preparation is simply a man with unusual ability and aptitude for his chosen profession, with great power of concentration and sustained effort…Even in his case might it not be an advantage to have a system of instruction that would give him the same results at a saving of much time and labor?”
Joseph Pulitzer argued that the only position that one can occupy by simple fact of birth is that of an idiot! Of course, writers are no idiots. So they need something more than just being born to become writers.
How then are writers made? I prefer to proffer some suggestions both from personal experience and that of others.
In the mid-seventies, when I worked in Federal Ministry of Mines and Power located at Broad Street, Lagos, I used to sneak out to various bookshops around Tafawa Balewa Square shopping arcade to buy books—mainly books on literature, biographies, religion, politics, general interest, etc. At Tafawa Balewa Street, there were over three medium-sized bookshops then. From there, I would rove to CMS Bookshop at the present Bookshop House, Yinkus Bookshop just near Tinubu Square and down to Challenge Bookshop further down Broad Street. Some days, I ended up at USIS library either to read books or to watch the CBS evening news.
In the 80s, when the economy had started wobbling badly and books and bookshops were badly hit, we scoured various bus stops for cheap but sometimes rare second-hand books and foreign magazines like TIME and Newsweek, Readers’ Digest and the like which are written in good English. The few friends I had—two actually—were also into books. For us then, buying books was a passion, so much so that we could go without food to buy books. I was determined to finish every novel published under the African Writers Series, apart from titles from English, Caribbean and Russian literature—those immortal classics. Reading was a personal consuming passion, an addiction of sorts. I preferred my own company most of the time, provided I had something to read—today, I still don’t go to my bedroom toilet without something to read, however so briefly!
By the time I got into journalism school, I was already completing the manuscript of a novel, for very often, not only does reading give birth to the desire to write, it hones the skills as we shall discuss soon.
After journalism studies, I was back at the ministry as a Store Officer. But I was still actively involvZed in writing for various newspapers at the time many of my colleagues were pulling various strings to get job. I had absolutely no such contacts, so no strings to pull. I studied the sections of various newspapers and wrote to suit their needs.
That was how I scored a big hit then. I had written some extended features—something of about 3,000 to 4,000 words each—to the then editor of the Sunday Concord, the late Dele Giwa. After publishing the materials, he told people to look for me. Within 24 hours, I was hired to work in Nigeria’s then premier weekly—it was a very big deal for a rookie to start at the top of the media industry. (I probably need to mention this for all those colleagues, uncles, acquaintances, friends, relations and army of job seekers who swear that the only way to get a job in the media is to pull strings in high places, badger them with notes, calls and even subtle blackmails! And many have refused to believe me that in today’s media setting, you can’t get job in the print media without demonstrated competence evidenced by past newspaper cuttings or any cuttings at all.)
Years later, as reporters—1987—Mike Awoyinfa and I decided to write a journalism textbook. We noticed a vacuum or a niche waiting to be tapped. There are no home-grown journalism textbooks. Journalism teachers rely on foreign books—mainly American books—to teach. But many of the examples are alien to our environment. The teachers were either too busy, unwilling or scared to write. For us hungry and eager reporters, we had nothing at stake—no big ego to protect if the book turns out bad.
To achieve originality, we went into the field to interview practitioners and various experts. We had the benefit of our own hands-on experience too, but we also read books, as usual. The result was a book, The Art of Feature Writing, which became a very successful manual for journalism education in the country—now in its fourth edition.
In 1993, with the military junta breathing down our neck and ultimately shutting the Concord Group of Newspapers (where we worked as editors), we decided to prepare ourselves for life outside the company and to learn how to manage business in case we had to establish our own media business. What to do? Ask the experts. Once again, Mike Awoyinfa and I were on the streets, interviewing the country’s corporate giants on everything to know about management in Nigerian terrain. (We always like to situate our books in Nigerian setting to give us brand distinction from their foreign counterparts and that invariably becomes our greatest selling point.) The result, again, after five years of toil, is an 816-page management epic, 50 NIGERIA’S CORPORATE STRATEGISTS—Top CEOs Share Their Experiences in Managing Business in Nigeria.
At N10,000 per copy, it was probably the costliest book in the market by Nigerian authors then. But surprisingly, we sold three editions of the book.
Just before we set up The Sun Publishing Limited, we needed to learn about what is at the heart of every business—marketing. For three years, we spent time interviewing and researching about the marketing secrets of Nigeria’s top companies and brands. The result is a 938-page book titled, NIGERIA’S MARKETING MEMOIRS—50 Case Studies, now just released. We have written other books. But I can’t go into all that here as I hope the above examples should suffice to illustrate my point.
Now, take a moment to review the above personal testimony. Were we able to write those books because:
a. We were born writers?
b. We were made writers by dint of effort?
If your answer is a, then it implies that we would have written those books anyway even if we spent our lives at disco parties! That is called fatalism, which I think is a lazy philosophy.
If your answer is b, then there must be certain things we did and certain things many writers do, to become writers. Drawing from my experience and that of others, let’s examine some of the defining elements that can make you a writer.
In my view, the first element is reading culture. A famous writer once described illiteracy “not simply as one who cannot read and write but one who is unacquainted with good literature.” Some seemingly educated people who have given up on reading of any serious materials blame it on the hassles of city life, the rat race for daily survival which denies people of time for reading. But in his famous 1972 essay, What Do African Intellectuals Read?, Achebe disagreed:
“The habit of reading itself is clearly the most important, for if it were strongly developed in our intellectuals, some of them at least would find the time. But the habit is simply not there.”
