Faith in the Writing Process

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1994, the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave an interview in which he talked about how he got started writing. He was a student at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the English department there held a short story contest and said they would give a prize to the best story.

So he thought, well, what the heck, I’ll write a story. And he waited and waited and no prize was given and no prize was given. And finally, after months, the English department announced that there was not going to be a prize offered because no story that was submitted was up to their standards. And he said, I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, you said my story wasn’t really good enough, but it was interesting. Now, what was wrong with it? She said, well, it’s the form. It’s the wrong form. So I said, can you tell me about this? She said, yes, but not now. I’m going to play tennis. We’ll talk about it. Remind me later and I’ll tell you. This went on for a whole term. Every day when I saw her, I’d say, can we talk about form? She’d say, no, not now. We’ll talk about it later. Then at the very end, she saw me and said, you know, I looked at your story again and actually there’s nothing wrong with it. So that was it. That was all I learned from the English department about writing short stories. You really have to go out on your own and do it.

Wow. Yeah. That’s a great story, right? Yeah. Don’t wait for the approval of other people. Right. And those meaningless prizes. Right. Right. Sometimes you have to find your own way and you can only learn to write by doing it. Yes, of course you need instruction in grammar and style and form, but at some point you have to break free and just do it and have a whole lot of failures before you have success.

He also mentioned that one of the professors there at that university gave him some advice that he really appreciated. His professor said, we may not be able to teach you what you need or what you want. We can only teach you what we know.

Yeah. Right. There’s a limit on all stages of the writing process, right? Yeah. There’s these parts of the knowledge are eclipsed from you until you move to the next stage. And Achebe said that this was a big lesson for him, that what he took away from that school more than anything, more than any type of learning, was just an attitude. It reminds me a little bit of the common writerly advice, butt in seat. That’s how writing gets done. Polish a chair. You put your butt in the seat and you do it.

So keep writing out there, y’all. 877-929-9673.