While I am a volunteer in Nigeria, I am also taking a correspondence creative writing course from Humber College in Toronto. I am trying to write a book and applied for a workshop at Humber last year which I was accepted into and very impressed by. My mentor was Esi Edugyan who won the Giller Prize that year for Half Blood Blues. For this seven month course, my mentor is Sally Cooper who is the author of two books, Love Object and Tell Everything. I can't speak for Love Object because I haven't read it yet but I very much enjoyed Tell Everything even though it dealt with some very dark, Paul Bernardo/Karla Hamolka resembling, subjects.
The book I am
attempting to write has to do with some of the experiences I had the
first time I backpacked through India in 2009/10 which, if you go
back through the records, you will realize is uncharacteristically
absent. To be truthful though, a large majority of the important
events in my life are not documented on my blog and remain somewhere
in my body until they are ripe for the world to taste. So now I am
weeding the soil around the seed and fertilizing it and doing some
Biodynamic pest control rituals on the side for good measure to
ensure that fruit is as sweet as I can make it. But as my good friend
Kristine from Blue Chicory always said “It's best to make all your
mistakes before you buy your own farm.”
For writing, it is all your own farm, but making mistakes and having a mentor to submit them to has been very helpful. It has helped me to see where my story is weak or awkward. Sally has also asked some insightful questions that have helped to pull out the story from the places it is still more comfortable hiding. I have already rewritten drafts and the results are much stronger but still not final. Writing is not an easy process. There is no real road map and no concrete directions. There isn't even a particular destination. After the peak of the mountain, you still wish you could fly higher. But somehow, the more you write, the more you understand yourself, the more you hear your own voice, the more you know what it is you're trying to say.
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One book that I've been reading is
“Writing Fiction” by Janet Burroway which has been recommended as
a text for the course. I think it was in that book where I read a
suggestion to take an idiom or cliche that has lost its meaning and
write a story detailing a new interpretation of the cliche that gives
it meaning again.
Nigeria has provided the perfect
example:
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