Some create with their hands; sculpting and molding awesome artistic pieces that leave one with a wow experience. Others with paint and pencil and brushes. Others create with their voices, singing notes that leave a listener with goosebumps. Others create with food, preparing dishes that leave even the most sophisticated culinary organs salivating for more. I create with words—just like the creator of Heaven and earth did. I love words. I love the power of words that makes the unseen seen and nonexistent be. Unlike the Creator whose creative process was flawless for it is written that He said “Let there be…and it was…” my creative process is messy and doesn’t flow as effortlessly as the Sovereign Creator’s.
My mind will perceive inspiration from the universe. Anything and everything is a possible source of inspiration: a thought that flashes across my mind as I listen to others’ conversations, while I watch the news or when I read something. Sometimes they are stories told by my children when they come home from school, or something that appeared on social media, my personal experience or friends or relatives’ experiences. Everything in me and around me inspires me to create. Once the inspiration hits, my mind will perceive and write it out. I call this my research time because whatever it is will be picked through from all possible angles, with questions asked and answered sometimes through reading, discussions, and interviews. The scenes, characters, dialogue, plot, etc will be created over a period of time as I mull over whatever it is that has inspired me. During this period, there will be questions asked and answers given on how to approach the different scenarios. There will be edits made depending on the answers given during these conversations. Once I finally gain the willpower to write, my mind goes blank. What gets through to the memory will be a few words working as flags marking a racecourse. Sometimes the words will come haltingly, tipping with hesitation, afraid of the touch of paper like a rape victim afraid of touch. This usually happens when I am writing prose and is probably the reason I have a few prose pieces published. In such moments I need sheer willpower to coax the words out of their shell. Other times they will tumble out like a hungry baby rooting for the breast. This is usually when I am writing poetry. In such moments they won’t wait for me to settle down, they will demand to be let free—be it in a taxi, in the shower or at night while I sleep. I have to interrupt whatever I am doing to give them a release. I remember one morning I wrote two poems in a taxi as I travelled to work. The road, like most roads in our country, was bumpy, filled with potholes and so the words sat unevenly on the pages of the notebook. My neighbour in the taxi looked at me askance, probably wondering what was so urgent that I couldn’t wait.
While others struggled to find balance in the seats as the taxi navigated through the potholes like a drunk on his way home, I struggled to write even lines. I have written poetry during workshops, meetings, and church services. Food I was cooking has been burned just because I stopped attending to it immersed in writing even though I was seated right next to the stove. My babies have cried themselves hoarse because I am writing. When these episodes hit, I write for hours uninterrupted, oblivious of anything else. My children and husband have come to identify these moments and most times will let me be. The craziest thing is that once the energy is spent, I will stop even in the middle of a sentence.
These are the rare moments. In a month, I might have such moments twice or thrice. The norm is to court words out like a suitor. It is doubly hard with commissioned pieces. Deadlines are indeed that—lines of death that leave me witless. When I have deadlines to meet, the words hide in the peripherals waiting. They will tease me throughout the duration, playing peekaboo until the last line is drawn. Then they choose to let go. It is both frustrating and exhilarating. Frustrating because in the days before the deadline, they clog my mind and leave no room for peace. With every hour that goes by without me writing them down, I lose a piece of humanity. Exhilarating because once they finally get loose, a sense of belonging settles in and they wrap me in the warmth of fulfillment. Usually, because I have too much pent up emotions churning inside, when let loose, they flood with creativity and beauty. I have written most of my best works during such moments.
I am an analog person. In this era of digitalization when people’s phones are their workstations, I still have to write first on paper with a pen or pencil. Once I have written on paper, then I typeset it using a word processor. It is at this point that I do my first editing of the work. My first drafts tend to be too wordy—sometimes not even coherent. When typing them out, I do my structural editing and make the piece tight. As I typeset, I am no longer a writer but an editor, thinking about the reader. Being an editor has greatly improved my writing. I have heard it said that editors usually fail to write because they are too critical. This is not the case for me. The two skills have mutually enriched each other.
After I have produced my first typed draft, my first readers are the club members at the Readers Writers Club at FEMRITE. This is if the assignment does not have to be submitted urgently. I will submit a piece I am struggling with for critiquing from the club members during our weekly meetings. Sometimes they are complete pieces, other times they are incomplete pieces that have hit a dead end. After receiving feedback from club members, I edit the piece where necessary. If I am still not sure about the piece, I will sometimes reach out to my friends (readers and writers) for further feedback. Receiving feedback is important for a creative person. If you are thinking of having your work published, especially for writers opting to self-publish, another set of eyes needs to look at your work. Your first readers evaluate your work and let you know whether there is content or a story worth reading even though it has not been polished. It is at this point that I know whether I should discard the idea or proceed with it.
In places where the publishing industry is well developed, most writers will hire professional editors to help polish their works. This is not the case in Uganda and so most times we have to rely on fellow readers and writers to give us this invaluable process. Feedback is very valuable to the growth of a creative. I have seen writers with great potential fail to grow in their craft because they are defensive over their work. Instead of receiving feedback with open minds, they get defensive. As a result, their craft never matures and for years they write like amateurs, missing out on publishing opportunities.
My poetry collection, Shards of Brokenness, is a product of peer feedback. Most of the poems were reviewed after getting feedback from the Readers Writers Club members. When I started compiling the collection, I would take at least one poem to the club for critique. I then sent the draft collection to two club members who gave me feedback which was of immense help. Their feedback helped me decide which poems to include in the collection and which ones to discard. It also helped me copy-edit some of the poems. In the final stages, I sent the collection to another friend—this time a lecturer of literature at Makerere University. I needed a professional eye to look through the collection. Note that my first readers included a fellow practicing poet who is well versed in the art of creating poetry. The other reader is an avid reader. The lecturer is both a practicing poet and editor and this is why I needed him to look through the collection at the final stages. All these people helped edit my work without any payment. If I had money, I would have paid an editor to work with through all these processes. Though I am an editor, I could not publish the book without having other eyes look through it.
I have heard people say one should write as they speak and my most respectful response to that is a raised eyebrow. I do not write as I speak. I cannot write as I speak. I learned to write before I could speak, learning from the books I read, novels and spiritual books written for adult readers, not the children’s books that were appropriate for my age. For years I rarely spoke, choosing to escape from the uncertainties and unpleasantness of my life to the worlds created in the works I read so how can I write as I speak?
I love creating with words, building worlds unseen, saying what is silent by the use of the alphabet. I have a fixation with words. I do not just throw them around but take care where I place each as I choose them. When I first revealed the title of my poetry collection, a reader reached out suggesting I change the word ‘Shards’ with a simpler synonym because the complex word could easily put off readers. My reply was that a synonym wouldn’t say what I wanted to say. Pieces of Brokenness wouldn’t capture the emotions of despair, pain, and wretchedness that is captured by the title Shards of Brokenness.
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