Writing, my first love.
One of the first things I can boldly say I fell in love with in life is writing. Hearing people say they started something when they were kids always felt amazing to me but recently I realized I also had that kind of story. I picked up interest in writing from when I was about 10–11years old (that’s how I remember it).
I loved to read also, although now that love has dropped a lot and is a bit exaggerated but there was a time I was so into reading books; novels, stories, plays. As a kid, I couldn’t let any story book or novel pass me by without reading. I spent my extra money on story books so much that they knew me at the closest bookstore to my house.
I would fantasize about owning a bookstore and I thought owners of bookstores were so lucky because they got to have access to so many books, it was a dream! I was so in love with reading! I remember my dad randomly mentioning opening a bookstore as a kid and I was so excited about it because it meant I would see and read so many books. He never opened that bookstore though.
From my first year in secondary school, I was already writing stories and plays. Plays were still a thing back then and I wrote plays a lot because they were easier for me to write. I had so many stories I wrote, just for writing sake…and also back then, I was obsessed with the idea of giving the characters in the stories I wrote foreign names. I would write stories and give my characters names like “Anastasia George, David Bentley” and so on. Now that I look in retrospect that was very funny and corny. I did that a lot, stories with full Nigerian names always looked local to me and I wanted to write like an “un-local” person. Now in recent times, when I write stories, I prefer full Nigerian names, ironic right?
Now I prefer to write my stories and articles with my originality and reality of my heritage reflecting.
It gives me so much satisfaction to showcase that. Names like Anastasia George now seem very weird to me as a Nigerian writer, let me have my Sade Adu please, I’d love that (chuckles).
Slowly I transitioned into writing more “poetry” than stories. The poetry is in quote because I just wrote, didn’t really see it as poetry until someone mentioned it was. I wrote to myself and for myself more. I didn’t really have people I could bare out my mind to so instead I wrote, for words I couldn’t speak or explain, I wrote.
I had so many items I wrote, I also loved scribbling quotes in stylish ways. I did it so much that my fine arts teacher in junior school noticed and told me how I had a potential in arts. I never really took what he said serious because a career in arts was the last thing in mind. As at then, I didn’t even think careers in art were worth seeing as careers.
I am so terrible with keeping memories and today, one of things that hurts me the most is how I never got to keep those items I used to write. I have no memory or physical proof of those things I wrote. I know reading them now I would find them stupid but I would love to. It would be so exciting to see how horrible those things were and how much my style, pattern and skill in writing improved over the years ( I believe that they did).
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie became my model for writing after I read her book Purple Hibiscus for the first time, I became obsessed! ( I still am). I wanted to write like her. I would use her pattern in my stories and she made me fall in love with using Nigerian characters. All her books reflected heritage and culture and I fell in love with that.
I believe currently, I have read purple hibiscus for like a hundred times. It’s still my all time favorite book.
Along the line, I suddenly forgot that love and interest I had in writing. At first, it seemed like the usual writer’s block so I decided to wait it out but it turned into such a long time that it started to feel like something I didn’t want to do anymore.
I had no inspiration or enthusiasm to put down anything. I went blank. While this didn’t feel strange to me because I always lose interest in things easily, I was a bit worried I was losing the only natural skill I felt I had. Losing writing meant I had nothing left. I watched myself go from writing at least once a week to never writing at all.
I only recently started writing again and now, I still don’t know if I will ever get back that burning passion I had for writing as a kid back or if I’ve lost it forever. I miss that burning passion.
Writing was my first love, and I don’t know what happened to me or how I threw that love all away or if I even still love it as much, but it remains forever in my consciousness that of all the many things in this world, writing won my heart first.
