By Mark Olali
My dream of writing was born in 2013 when I entered into a congenial partnership with Bedford Iniye to run a magazine company. At that time, the two of us, novices in what one might consider good writing, didn’t have the flair to write a clear and sturdy sentence. When I wrote, it was a vast tangle of oxygen-depriving expressions.
Neither of us had the slightest idea of handling a print magazine business. We were just individuals with the determination to gain mastery by embracing the unknown.
Clearly, we needed someone with a knack for writing—someone who was literally gifted with the pen and could command words to their will, using them to their best advantage and achieving the greatest clarity.
Again, none of us considered who would write until we realised that we didn’t have the money to hire writers who did the type of writing we wanted. When the question of who among us would write came up, both of us were stupefied and went silent as if a cube of ice had fallen from the sky. This brought us to a crossroads: one had to either take up that role or defer the idea—something we regarded as a treasure.
Iniye was a DJ. He was very smart, although not a bookish person, and one who sat for hours peering through the pages of a novel, regardless of the genre. Given this, it was fair to conclude that it should not be him.
On the other hand, Iniye had seen me several times with novels, with an intimidating expression and composure of that nerd in class who only exists in memory and pops up when somebody says, “Hey, he looks like a nerd.”
His gaze had strange flashes of disbelief because I was quiet too. Perhaps he thought I could write well. If I said I could not, he might feel he had overrated me, I thought.
Not only would this reduce my self-worth, but it would diminish my proud struggle of carrying a novel around to mere melodrama. At this point, I accepted the writing role, even though I lacked the ability to write catchy paragraphs and connect them properly across pages, making one flow into the next.
I told myself I’d learn endlessly. From that day on, I established a routine of burying myself behind books by writers whose style I wanted to emulate.
I read authors such as George Orwell, William Shakespeare, Chinua Achebe, E.B. White, and William Zinsser. They were excellent stylists with the gift of making you fall in love with a subject you previously had no interest in. For a writer, that is nothing short of a miracle.
After reading a book by one of these authors, I would recreate a passage and, in an awkward way, imitate the voice of the writer. While this sometimes turned out well, other times it did not. But at least, with this exercise, I improved day by day.
However, I was still haunted by big words and fanciful phrases. I troubled the reader too much, obscuring the meaning of my message in the process.
As is common with most beginners, I was never relaxed in my attempts to wrestle with clutter. Sadly, this made me overly verbose, indulging in the use of verbal false limbs and dead metaphors.
Although, with time, I got it right, I learned to remain calm, even though no writer ever truly relaxes while writing, and stripped my sentences to their barest bones. If a word was not doing a useful job in a sentence, I removed it. My aim was to achieve a desirable freedom from clutter.
As such, I rewrote what I had written until I felt there were no flaws. Before letting a piece out, I asked myself if it was good enough, judging by its message, warmth, and clarity. If it was not, I reviewed and fixed the problem.
I likened writing well to the process of building a house. We start with a solid foundation and raise the structure before thinking of adding designs and furniture. Thinking this way improved the flow of my work and made it more engaging for the reader.
Over time, applying these rules has greatly improved my writing style, increasing the creativity and readership of my content. I can say that I am a better writer now than I was a few years ago.
Although the magazine project was suspended due to a lack of financial resources and stagnation in Bayelsa’s economic atmosphere, I am grateful for the day Iniye Bedford proposed that we run a magazine together, where the clouds leaped and heaven was forced to speak.
