My Writing Journey,loool!

As a little girl I knew a lot of big words. I knew them because I read stories that were way beyond my years. The novels I read were written by James Hadley Chase, Agatha Christie and the likes of them. So when I began to write, I wrote exactly the same things I read about. I wrote about diehard criminals and impeccable policemen. And used words like boulevard even though it was hard to imagine what that looked like.
My exclamations would come in form of "for the love of mike", "for pete's sake", and so on. I wrote that my characters patronized grocery stores and waited for the pizza man to deliver their orders while they lay down on settees. It didn't matter that I wasn't even sure what a settee was or that in Nigeria our grocery stores were called supermarkets and then, I was just eight and though I lived in one of the fast-growing urban areas, pizza  delivery was not yet quite common. Yet I wrote anyways. I would often write, imitating James Hadley Chase, almost rewriting his last book I had read.

I find it really strange now because even I couldn't relate with what I wrote. But that sort of writing did something to me. It gave me a part of America. So that by the time I was ten I could confidently say that,  Chicago was the biggest city in Illinois and that if an American had lots of money he invested part of it in precious stones.  I read very few Nigerian novels. And when I eventually started reading more of them, some didn't really make much sense. I remember thinking that Wole Soyinka's The Lion and The Jewel had too much grammar. I found myself using the dictionary while I read the book. It felt like study to me. I also found myself incapable of copying Soyinka because my tender mind could not come up with words like ignoble and ignoramus on its own.

I got my first paradigm shift when I was twelve years old. One of my English Literature books was Echoes of Hard Times, a book of short plays.


To be continued in the next post!