Notes of a Frustrated Writer

Image by Gülfer ERGIN on Unsplash

Twenty twenty-two was a bad year. It was my final year at Obafemi Awolowo University. I was in 400L. Or: it was supposed to be my final year and I was supposed to be in 400L. But by the time we resumed late January, we spent the first few weeks doing nothing. If memory serves, there was maybe one or two introductory lectures and then nothing after. No class. No sales of handouts. No course outlines. Plus industrial action was brewing. Some university lecturers were threatening the government with a strike for unpaid entitlements and unfulfilled promises. By mid February an ASUU strike was full-blown, a strike that’d last eight months. 

At first I was on campus, crashing at J.’s room at Awolowo hall of residence. I only read, played music and podcasts on Spotify, watched movies on Netflix, cooked if there was a need to, watched Real Madrid football matches in the common room, slept long and deep. But I read a lot. I was reading for my final-year project. I wanted to work on Comrade Memes, and so I read about memes, social media, Discourse Analysis, etc. Then I grew tired of academic reading as the strike lengthened. I started reading novels, essay collections, books on black consciousness, essays on photography, books on the craft of writing. I read Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Teju Cole, Kevin Everod Quashie, Susan Sontag, Amitava Kumar, Emmanuel Iduma, Roland Barthes, Colson Whitehead, etc., etc. This was when I started using the book-tracking app Goodreads properly. 

I wrote a lot, too. I’d written one day on my IG story about someone I’d known only for a few months but had developed a big crush on. She was the one who recommended Quashie’s Black Aliveness or the Poetics of Being when I asked if she could suggest a book on black consciousness. We were supposed to read it together. But I read it within a few days, saying I had to before going back to reading papers and monographs for my thesis. In retrospect I’d read it that quickly to impress her.

In the IG story, I wrote about how, randomly thumbing through Instagram, I had come across, in my exact words, the glorious. That was true. Before I wrote the IG story, I had indeed been stopped in my tracks by one of this person’s pictures. I was hypnotized. Her dark skin was the color of déjà vu. On seeing it, on seeing her, I blurted out how I had just fallen in love in the presence of J. and his roommates. J. asked, “With what?” and we all laughed at him because he hadn’t asked “who” but “what.” He then said I only had time for books and money. Not relationships. Laughters dissolving into smiles, I sat there thinking, J.’s words sinking in. 

That IG story became the first of a public journal that I kept throughout 2022, migrating from IG to a blog – this one – shortly after, only stopping in early 2023. It had a decent readership. Most posts averaged 100 reads in one or two days. That was a motivation to keep on writing. But I also enjoyed the writing of it. For hours, I wrote, I edited. I had on the side, also, other pieces I worked on. Most of them were narrative essays and short stories, which, after multiple edits and many drafts, I tried to sell to magazines and earn something from them. But my submissions were bouncing back rejected. My email and Submittable were littered with rejections. I kept on submitting, yet the rejections remained steady.

That year, the only publication I had was by adda stories for a short story accepted the previous year. And the only acceptance I got, which came very late in the year, was for the Punocracy Prize for Satire. Inspired by Teju Cole’s essay “In Place of Thought” and Gustav Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, I’d written a little dictionary of Nigerian clichés and stereotypes but also an innocent fun-poking at some inconsequential habits, which was published in 2023. Beside this, I couldn’t get any of my pieces sold for publication.

This remained so till December 2022, when school resumed, and so remained through July 2023, when I submitted my final-year thesis. During this period, I became depressed. I was having less and less money, my pocket bulging with emptiness, and yet personal responsibilities kept piling up. I had never thought I could live on whatever money I made from writing but a hundred-dollar acceptance could have done something.

By then I’d stopped working at pre-varsity tutorials who extorted students and slaved their tutors. I had an English Department-focused tutorial I worked for, where I’d taught since I was in 200L. But the class I was teaching was trickling out. It was a class of 300L students, who mostly attended tutorials for Stylistics and, perhaps, Literature. I wasn’t teaching them any of these, and so there was eventually nobody to teach and no work to get paid for.

The apartment I’d gotten off-campus was robbed while nobody was home, and I had to pack out my stuff the thieves didn’t steal. I had to manage at D.’s, also at Awo hall, for the remainder of final year. It took mostly the kindness of friends like J. and D. to make it through that period. 

With no piece accepted, I soon lost confidence in my writing. I had to now accept that all the essays and stories I’d sent out were shitty. Which meant I also had to start learning writing all over again. I was confused about craft. I was frustrated.

I was in this state when, in July 2023, shortly after finishing school, a US-based Nigerian friend and I compiled a list of essays on writing. We suggested essays we’d read and liked or those we knew about but hadn’t read. B., the friend, created an MS Word document, wrote in it the selected essays, titled it “Summer Food,” and shared me. We started reading them immediately. Most times we read aloud and in turns on hours-long WhatsApp calls. Then we’d discuss what we’d learnt, sometimes immediately, sometimes after a while.

The summary of all I've learnt is now contained in an essay: this. Did I need to read all these essays on writing to write better? Or: should I have just written more, edited more? If asked now, I will say the latter. I’ve come to realize all the stories and essays I’d tried to sell are indeed shitty. The best of the pack, perhaps, is an essay on strangers. A collection of vignettes first written feverishly in my notebook after reading Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, it lacks a strong cohesive anchor. Many drafts of the essay are in the shape of what Tim Bascom calls “framed vignettes.” But that would have worked had the essay been a flash nonfiction.

Did I realize this while reading the craft essays with my friend? No, I did not. All I needed was plenty patience. I needed to let the essays and stories fallow, go off to read stories, essays, novels, whatnots, write other essays and stories, and then come back to the first essays and stories.

I had also thought that if I could get a few decent publications, my then crush with skin the color of déjà vu would be impressed. This, in retrospect, had intensified my writerly panic and confusion. I couldn’t get a piece accepted and published, and so I couldn’t impress my crush, and so a hole dented my life in the middle, through which its colors kept leaking.

Why then was reading about the craft of writing needed? To be sure, there were new insights gained as there was known wisdom reiterated. But then these insights, especially the already-known, were needed to let me know that what I knew about the physical act of writing were still true and I was only going through a bad time during which almost everything I wrote was bad. Not like I’d realized at the time. I hadn’t. But as I read, sanity trickled into my mind little drops after little drops.

It has now become a habit to come back to this essay once in a while and remind myself of the things I’d already know, of the act of patience, of the promises I’d made to myself while reading those craft essays, to let sanity trickle into my being, to give myself permission to hang in there when writing isn’t going well, to keep redrafting even when there’s a rush to submit, a need to make a little from my writing, to remind myself impressing a crush is beyond the limits of my office.

Here, then, are the notes I made when I was most frustrated with what I’d chosen to do for life.

I. People

What does Zadie Smith say about writing in the essay “Something to Do”? She posits that the deepest answer to the question of why she writes, perhaps why we write, is that it is something to do, something to fill up all this empty time. For her “there is no great difference between novels and banana bread.” “They are both just something to do.” This isn't casual rhetoric or a rude dismissal of people’s regard for writing. It’s a bold confrontation with the writing life, from which those who could might scoop up some wisdom. After all we know there are differences between Things Fall Apart and boiled corn. Just as there are differences between Smith and Dr. Shoe, a cobbler from a former church of mine.

But there are things to pick off her submission. For one it helps me strip writing of mysticism. Being a writer doesn’t make me special. I’m human still and will be even if I cease being a writer just as I was before I became one. I see this as an underlying injunction to be humane towards people and to not think my life conditions, bad or sad, good or gay, special. No one should be looked down on because I’m a writer and they are not. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that every man he met was in some way his superior and in that he could learn from him. If the context had been respect instead of learning, Emerson could have said something like: every person he met was just as human as he was and he could for that respect them just as he, being a human, deserved to be. This – thanks to Smith – is my belief.

Apropos people: Lydia Davis’ second charge in “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” is to center one’s interest in one’s work. To write or note from things that interest me. Never from what I should be writing and noting. She writes: “Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people – either real other people or imagined other people.” She thinks people, both literary people and plain people, often think their opinions superior.

She might have implied, too, later in the essay, in a different context, that caring about what people think is self-censorship and thus kills originality. She believes originality comes not from laboring to be original but from working, at the very least, on my character and not inhibiting my instincts or thoughts, so far they don’t harm people’s feelings. “Disregard what other people may think (but not what they may feel).” My individuality is at stake if I care what people think. This is why I mustn’t. This is why, also, most of my writerly learning should be on my own. This is why I must be mostly self-taught. By the way, Davis’ final recommendation in the essay, in full, is: “Finally, maintain humility with regard to language and writing.”

Now back to Smith. There is another lesson suspended in her insight. Unlike the former reorientation of hers, which is about the ethics of writing, this is about the practice. The hint is that the craft isn’t special either. There is at the base of everything no greater difference between the suya vendor across the street and the guy crafting poems in the adjacent building. Sure, the latter’s poems about white Sabo-Lagere buses dallying in traffic might tomorrow become a classic on the transience of life while the former might only be tending to the stuff of the belly. Similarly, there is no great difference between a programmer and a writer. All are doing something. All are stuffing life with meaning.

Once I realized this I could be set off by a remark from David Finchers’ The Social Network (2010). In Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) California apartment, Sean (Justin Timberlake) flatly tells Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) that Zuckerberg has been coding for 36 hours and is now just taking a nap. That was it for me. Fired up, I WhatsApped B., texting:

bruh, just saw the social network. there is a scene where a character informs another character that zuckerberg has been coding for thirty-six hours, and is only just getting a nap. that was it for me. i wantto do hours of writing. i wantto write long, hard, big. i wantto be writing, rewriting, editing, for four, six, eight, ten, twelve hours. i want to be obsessive.

Call it the burning paper effect but I’m determined to burn forever.

II. Classics

With dark humour and self-mockery, Italo Calvino answers the question the title of his essay asks in “Why Read the Classics?” But, first, he gives a set of definitions, all of them not unconnected, of what a classic is. He intuits that a classic, a book which hasn’t finished – and in fact cannot finish – saying what it says, is a book people don't read but reread. It’s a book that, all things equal, is read not out of respect or duty but love. For him a classic doesn’t teach people what they do not already know. Such book, already in the public consciousness, is part of an interior logic of life. Anyone who reads a classic is only relearning what they, having been raised within the culture, already know. Ultimately Calvino proposes each person invent their own library of classics.

I would say that such a library ought to be composed of half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count – leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries.

The answer to the question the title of the essay asks? Well, he thinks to read the classics is better than not to. He doesn’t justify this. But the scanty, understated reasons I imagine he gives idle away in some folds of the essay, preceding the answer itself. Then, to anticipate any objection that curating personal classics isn’t worth that much trouble, he himself defeats such activity by quoting Cioran. In the quote, Socrates was learning a tune on a flute while he was supposed to be preparing hemlock with his colleagues. Seeing this, they asked him what good it’d do him if he knew the tune before he died. 

I believe Calvino.

But the question now is: how do I as a writer curate my collection of classics? 

III. Family

I have a question in mind when I think of family as a writer. How do I as a writer curate my collection of classics? Italo Calvino half-answers this: my personal library could be composed of half the books I’ve read that have counted for me and half I propose to read and presume would count. The unanswered half is: how do I presume the books I propose to read will count for me? Or better still: what kind of books should I propose to read?

For this I seek a reset in Austin Kleon’s concept of creative lineage. Steeped in Marcel Duchamp’s skepticism in art but faith in artists (“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.”), the concept requires that I pick a favourite writer and study everything about them. Then I find three writers this one writer is influenced by and study everything about them, too. I could repeat this as many times as possible. To do otherwise, to study the history of my art form (writing), as it is on its own, is to choke. Dead or alive, the members of my creative lineage will walk me through just enough history. Besides, history is personal. We know only the part we choose to know. Choosing is everything. Everything is chosen. This is a sentiment shared by Ben Lerner. 

But I find this fine concept stuffy. Not that it is not expansive. It is. But it's expansive in one direction. For Austin up is the only route. For me up is only a route. I'm freer if my writerly family spreads out in every direction plus up. If Austion suggests I look up at the writers my favourite writer looks up to, I also want to look down at those writers that look up to my favourite writer. This might help detect what is mostly copied or easily appropriated from my favourite writer. This is necessary since I wouldn’t want to copy what these writers are copying from my favourite writer or in the same way they do.

So far, the top and the base of the family tree only include the writers that are biologically related to my favourite writer. First, at the top, above my favourite writer, are the writers that my favourite writer looks up to. Then, at the base, below my favourite writer, are the writers that look up to my favourite writer. 

The two sides of my family tree, then, include those writers who aren’t biologically related to my favourite writer. Those, that is, my favourite writer does not look up to and those that do not look up to my favourite. If the former group, naturally selected, are biological members of my family, this latter group, cherry-picked and chosen, are foster members of my family. They include other favourite writers beside my first favourite writer. I could place them on either side of my first favourite writer.

But, of course, these writers on the foster sides of my family could be picked by my favourite writer. If I could understand what my favourite writer looks for in a piece of literature and what kinds of writers excite them, I would collect a foster family that my favourite writer, if asked, would have selected for me or, at least, would approve of. 

Thus.

The other half of my collection of classics, those books I propose to read and believe will count for me, are those by my family: foster or biological. My personal library is set for life, its section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries intact.

IV. Doubled

I find WEB Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness handy when I think of myself as a writer. It's redundant to dwell on the importance of reading for myself. Everyone knows I can’t write if I haven’t read. I can’t be a writer if I’m not a reader. It’s superfluous to dwell on this. But I will for a moment before I circle back to double consciousness.

Linguists have told us that of the basic communicative skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing – reading, which precedes writing, is second to the last. The first and the third – listening and reading – are called receptive skills and the second and the last – speaking and writing – productive skills. If the former are absorbent the latter are projectile. To indulge Noam Chomsky, a baby will project and produce infinite communicative exports from their stash of finite language inputs received and absorbed. The baby will speak continuously based on the limited things they’ve heard. The baby will write continuously, too, based on the limited things they’ve read. The point I’m struggling to make is not that what the baby should hear or read be limited. The point is unlocking the interior logic of language.

The question, then, is: how as a writer do I read?

In “Homage,” JM Coetzee sets up an example of how a writerly reading is done. When, in 1961, at the age of 21, Coetzee settled, after a fresh South African undergraduate degree, into a London job that ensured that, from nine to five every Monday to Friday, he was immersed in computer language, he understudied the cinema of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, boundless in its pushy ambition to transcend even the realm of impossibility. He decoded the inner working of the great Faulknerian sentences that plane the cloud of thoughts so unbelievably, so unpredictably, so flawlessly, that all breath is held, pushed, pushed, held, and, finally, killed: all “a formula for perception racing beyond language, language just barely keeping touch with the movement of the mind.” He unlocked the layered magic of Samuel Beckett’s sparse syntax shaped by a military orderliness. (“The thought was like a ravening dog; the prose was like a taut leash.”) The list goes on, endless. Maybe there is no great difference between a programmer and a writer? I’d guess so. Every writer is a programmer coding human language. Looking at Coetzee’s slim presses of skeletal prose, so vividly displayed in Disgrace and The Books of Jesus, the bet in fact is clear.

Teju Cole invokes Coetzee when, in Eight Letters to a Young Writer, he offers: “Read slowly, like someone studying the network of tunnels underneath a bank vault in preparation for a heist.” But how to really do this? This, as per Davis, means reading closely and stopping to analyse how a writer achieves an effect, be it music, imagery, sentence length, be it plot, humor, or endings. With pencils or highlighters, I could ring or color those left-branching clauses that ferry a reader smoothly and sonically to the small nucleus of the sentence. A beautiful example of this is done throughout Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style – a book Davis highly recommends. 

I’m envious of Coetzee’s fastidiousness. I look at the small old man, and I realize that, until I begin to parse prose and poetry as he does, analyse books like Davis suggests, unpack sentences like Tufte will, I’m not yet a writer and never will be. Yet I cannot parse every book I propose to read like this. If I do, the ghost of Calvino will laugh at me as I fade away into the timeless cloud.

Thus.

I seek solace in Lydia Davis. Per Davis I have to read a lot. I have to read different kinds of books across different periods. But I have to read in different ways. Some books I have to read closely, detecting all the while how a writer handles a situation or an aspect of the story as well as how they achieve an effect. Others I merely lose myself in, sucking on the narrative juice. Naturally my cut of personal classics belong to the first group, which is a closed class of books. The other is an open class and includes all other books.

But here comes the paradox. Can I merely lose myself in a book? Can I merely enjoy a story? Can I read a fine phrase and not notice? Used to reading books deeply, my interior modulator is always open, consciously or not, picking up writerly frequencies. I could suppress it. But open it always is.

For me this paradox is best explained by the concept of double consciousness. When I’m reading I’m writing. Pompous and self-centred, my writerly mind takes charge and, to suit my style, sentences are rephrased, paragraphs reframed, and techniques reconfigured. Adjustment is ad infinitum.

The reverse, too, is true. When I’m writing I’m reading. The interior logic of language I’ve so far glimpsed from all the books that inform my practice provides the thumbprint for the patterning of the new text. Writing is going over such interior logic, such guiding principles, once again. Really, when I’m writing a piece on craft, such as this, self-addressed as it is, I’m applying some of the mechanics that went into the craft essays and pieces by Calvino, Coetzee, Smith, Davis, Kumar, Cole, etc. Writing my craft piece is rereading the mechanics of their craft pieces. Writing mine is learning about theirs – if for a repeated time. To write, V.S. Naipaul has claimed after all, is to learn.

That Naipaul quote, culled from his literary-cum-travelog autobiography Finding the Centre, is taken out of context and out of tense. Here, in full, exact form, is what Naipaul means: “To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt l was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.” But it doesn't matter. The point is made.

Being a writer is being doubly conscious. Writing is reading. Reading is writing. I’m a reader when I write. I’m a writer when I read. After all Virginia Woolf submits that one should read a book – should one desire to read such book well – as if one were writing the book. The gap between writing and reading is close, closed, closeted. There is in fact no gap at all.

V. Love

I imagine the books without which I will die are a palpable proof of my narcissism. Such books mean a lot to me. They are a part of me. And they are an extension of my ego. If I write a piece influenced by these books I suppose I’m writing a love letter to these books and their authors. Maybe every writing is a love letter in disguise. Maybe every writing is a love letter. The obvious: I love these books. But maybe I hate them as well?

Calvino submits that everything Jean-Jacques Rousseau thinks and does is very dear to his heart. Still, everything fills him with a stubborn desire to contradict him, to criticize him, to quarrel with him. I assume Italo is suggesting that, when I write, I’m re-writing the books in my circle of classics not necessarily in form of a love letter disguised as influence but as a riposte to the things I've dared to reject about them. How, with the right mix of brashness and arrogance, could I have bettered a book already in its best form?

For me, then, the fun – or the task – becomes finding the balance between adoring a book and shredding such book so as to rebuild it into a thing that won't be more adored. I’m hung between loving and killing the things I adore, loving and killing my darlings. 

My books thus become an attempt to love and hate these books that I so much love. My writing becomes a vain act of bettering writings that – already in their best forms – cannot be bettered.

VI. Readers

In a Greenlight Bookstore reading by Teju Cole, who conversed with Amitava Kumar, a lady asked Cole about the man in sky-blue cap who pops up a few times in Every Day is for the Thief. The man appears with either one eye closed, blinded or bad. Five times in the book, Cole said, when nothing is happening, either in a crowd or in a quiet moment, the narrator sees and describes this man. If closely observed, the reader sees that he’s the same person. Cole jokes that the lady has found the punctum, the Barthesian concept for a small, almost unnoticeable part of a photograph (or, of course, an artwork) that pierces or punctures the viewer in some way. Every work of writing is layering, Cole offered, and, paraphrasing Milan Kundera, went on to say there should be something for the reader who is willing to read the book four times, which maybe they might not catch on the first three readings. The logic is: there are certain things for people to catch on the first reading and there are things to be caught on the second but there are things that are maybe just for the writer. 

I find a story recounted in Cole’s essay “Shadows in Sāo Paolo” similarly refreshing. Gabriel Garcia Márquez was asked who the best reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude was. Cole recounts what Mázquez had said:

“A Russian friend met a lady, a very old lady, who was copying the whole book out by hand, right to the last line. My friend asked her why she was doing it, and the lady replied, ‘Because I want to find out who is really mad, the author or me, and the only way to find out is to rewrite the book.’ I find it hard to imagine a better reader than that lady.”

Useful, too, is Calvino’s proposition that we all create personal libraries containing books that count or will count for us. For one this could serve as a good measure to guess who I write for whenever I do. Perhaps the person whose small collection of classics a piece of mine will be a part of is my implied reader? Maybe every writing is a search for that one reader who is willing to know who is mad between themself and the writer? I’m not sure. I don’t know. I never will. But my guess is: yes.

It could be dejecting to think that I write for a single person whenever I write. Conversely, I find this comforting. Books are promiscuous. A book of mine could become part of a person’s or a million persons' small slews of classics. The point is confiding in that one person. If I successfully address that person the work will flirt and worm itself into the lives of countless others who are just like my ideal reader. But if it doesn’t, nothing, to entertain a Pascalian sense of humour, is all I’ve lost. The point is to write that one good book. But how to? In the poem “A Gentleman Compares His Virtues to a Piece of Jade,” Michael Ondaatje writes: “Solitaries spent all their years/writing one good book.” That’s how to. 

Towards the end of his response to Theodora, Cole said that the man in the sky-blue cap was inspired by the bicycle-riding character from Kryszystof Kieślowski’s Dakalog. He meddles with nobody’s business and only drives past some scenes in every instalment of the ten-part limited series. Cole’s man, like Kieślowski’s bicycle guy, is an angel witnessing the narrator witness Lagos. Maybe every piece of art is a remaking of the pieces it is influenced by. Maybe every writer is looking for who is mad between themself and their influences? As the paradox goes in Ben Okri’s novel The Freedom Artist, there are books that are read only by writing them. 

VII. Nothing

In “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” Lydia Davis enjoins me to regularly take notes. She suggests some things to observe and note down. “Observe your own activity. Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length). Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human. Observe other types of behavior, including that of municipalities. Note technical/historical facts.”

In a Hong Kong Book Fair chat, Ben Okri suggested that, in place of the most dramatic things in their lives, young writers should learn how to write about nothing before slowly learning how to write about something. Then he asks the audience to give examples of nothings. “Waiting for the bus. Buying the milk. Drinking a cup of tea. Sitting in an empty room. Before sleeping. Washing your hair.”

I see Okri’s suggestion as a summarization of Davis’ recommendation. My activity could be nothing or something. Just as the behaviours of other people, animals, the weather and municipalities as well as a technical or historical fact. But beside this, I suspect both Ben and Davis imply that writing elevates nothing into something. “There is no such thing as nothing in the human experience,” Okri later said. “It is all something.” I believe him. Something is nothing well written.

Later in the essay, while discussing how a story can grow out of a taken note, Davis offers her story as an example:

“Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?”

“Sorry?”

“Caramel syrup or caramel drizzle?”

Long pause for deliberation.

“I’ll take the drizzle.”

Later, she walks away with another airline employee, the empty cup in her hand, the caramel drizzle inside her.

And then she turns out to be the attendant on our flight—her name is Shannon—so her caramel drizzle will also be going to Chicago with us.

In a different essay and in a different context, “A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked: Form and Influence I,” Davis offers an entry from Kafka’s Dairies.

The picture of dissatisfaction presented by a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place on which he stands.

Then she offers two stories of hers, “Lonely” and “Hand.”

Lonely

No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.

Hand

Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.

The stories and the diary entry above are somethings only because they’re well written nothings. One way to do this is to trust Viktor Shylovsky, who, in “Art as Technique,” posits that good art forces us to see life anew. It defamiliarizes life and disabuses us of the automated perception of it. Of the above Kafka’s diary entry, Davis writes: “In just a few words, he offers a different way of seeing a commonplace thing.”

In the spirit of and in homage to Lydia Davis, I’ve attempted in my notebook some nothings. Some of them are below.

Wet

He is tired of making his point. He stops his speech mid-sentence. By now, his shirt is soaked at the chest with sweat, his thought wetting the parsley patterns.

Off

The bird softened her spread out wings and took off, flying into the future.

Big

I wonder what big questions of life are concealed in the softness of his big beard.

Spill

The bucket idles in the corner of the room, its water threatening to spill over.

Seated

The bus stops a stint after Popoola Filling Station in front of the line of shops and vendors selling corn and walnuts. The man beside me at the front seat steps down in his jeans and white polo, and walks towards a triangle of short street side bush. There, he urinates, emptying all the water he has drunk all day. He comes back when he’s done. When seated, he begins to eat the walnuts he bought from the vendors who earlier approached the bus, filling up his water-empty belly. The bus soon taxis off, and the man carries the walnuts in his belly into the rest of the journey while the bush drinks his water.

Rush

We are in the cab, a red Nissan Micra. We are on to Iwo Road from New Garage. We are six, the driver and five of us passengers, two in front, three at the back. No one talks. We only keep an expanse of tarred road rushing away from us.

Slow

Outside, the rain is scanty but steady, a slow music on the concrete downstairs. Behind the closed louvers and white-painted burglar proof, the curtain is a splash of condensed cream and a disbursement of brightly-coloured flowers. Patiently, it floats back and forth. The motion is slow, painfully so. But it communicates well with the swirl of breeze in the small room.

Colourful

The flat-screen TV on the left at Remight Viewing Center is dulled in colour. Perpetually tinged, it has a woozy orange hue, as though, up beyond it, a cracked yolky sun about to spill over is permanently frozen in time. The people living life inside it have their figures retraced slightly with colourful shadows that sometimes whorl about them.

VIII. Recap

EMMANUEL IDUMA:  “Memos on Nonfiction”

LYDIA DAVIS:  “Thirty Recommendations for a Good Writing Habits”

ITALO CALVINO: “Why Read the Classics?”

J.M. COETZEE: “Homage”

TEJU COLE: Eight Letters to a Young Writer

T.S. ELIOT:  “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

VIKTOR SHLOVSKY:  “Art as Technique”

ZADIE SMITH:  “Something to Do” 𖦹