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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Lecture I
The PJW Lecture Series is a cycle of interactive cross-genre lecture workshops by Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on various aspects of craft and technique for creative writers.
Introduction to Creative Writing:
The Three Genres of Literature
WELCOME
Welcome to the Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings PJW Creative Writing Lecture Series. This series is a writing workshop online. I will be your moderator as we discuss the creative process or the process of emptying your imaginative stories, poems, and plays from your mind onto a blank page. The lecture series targets a specific group, but anyone interested in writing will relate to the topics and the issues around the process of writing as we dialogue. The reason for the disclaimer here is to help you understand that in my discussion of poetry writing, fiction writing, and playwriting, I will focus on how the African oral tradition is the most important influence upon the writing that I do and the writing that my target audience does. In other words, I am intentionally seeking to reach those writers of African descent, in the Diaspora, on the continent of Africa, and many whose intent is to write in a tradition and in a voice that is authentic to their background as Africans.
I have had many opportunities of teaching creative writing to non-Africans, and have enjoyed this immensely, but this time, the request from the editor, Stephanie Horton, is for me to work with writers who are seeking to write globally while keeping their voice authentically theirs, many who have never had an experience in the creative writing classroom or have not had the money to pay for training.
Much of what I will impart during this lecture series online will come from my own experience as a writer beginning from my childhood, from my own background growing up in Africa with the storytelling of my mother, grandmother, and my grandfather, and from my experience living in an African city—Monrovia—that was often not so African and not so western. I also come to you from my background of having been educated both in the United States and in Liberia, from the background of having been mentored by Liberian professors as well as American writers and professors of writing. I have been fortunate to have both the tutoring of my non-western literate grandparents and the very famous and not so famous professors of creative writing at Western Michigan University, Indiana University, and the University of Liberia. Most important of all, I come to you as an ordinary student of writing, one who continues to discover that the writer is always seeking to grow, one who writes for the beauty of it, who lives on writing as a special time of fun, one who teaches creative writing, and who is being tutored by my students even as I tutor them. Having said all of this, I invite you to join me in this beautiful conversation about writing, knowing very well that I am still learning how to write, and who knows, I could learn a lot from being tutored by your voice and your knowledge.
Welcome, my brother, my sister, welcome with kola nuts and spicy pepper to the conversation.
OBJECTIVES & OUTCOMES
This online lecture series is intended to equip the beginning writer with the tools necessary to grow as a writer, to help in the dialogue about writing, editing, polishing, publishing, to assist the writer to hold on to their individual voice during the process of developing as a writer.
Each student writer who follows the discussion through should develop skills in the basic writing of poetry, fiction, and playwriting; the processes involved in developing these different forms of writing to a point where the work is publishable.
The most important objective is to help writers become editors of their own work even as they become better writers. There is no guarantee that one will improve their skills as a writer just by reading the postings on this series. Each individual must practice writing in the genre of their choice on a regular basis, find someone to read their work, and each individual must edit, revise, and rewrite in order to develop their skills. Reading of published poetry, fiction, non-fiction and plays is essential if one must grow as a writer. I therefore recommend that readers regularly read from the best of contemporary fiction, poetry, and plays as they develop their own craft.
POETRY, FICTION, AND DRAMA
Writing a story, a poem, or a play is like any other form of art. Writing creatively is similar to any other profession. One needs the tools and skills it takes to become a master craftsperson, to become excellent or just good at it. One needs tutoring, mentoring, people who support their writing or someone to listen to in order to become the best one can be. Without this support, the writer burns out, trying to become good, becomes simply mediocre, never achieves what he or she was meant to achieve or just quits writing. That does not mean that writers who have the gift to become great writers and work hard at teaching themselves do not achieve. No, I am not saying this. I mean that it takes a lot of discipline and effort for one in this day and age to become the best without outside support and teaching; therefore, it is a good thing when a writer has the humility to accept criticism, guidance, and support from others who are on the same path.
Let’s talk about creating a story or a poem or a play for that matter. Most African children grow up on all kinds of tall tales, tales of spiders, of animals, myths and legends about heroes and the tribesmen who have fought this or that battle, about children who got drowned because they did not listen to their mother’s instruction, about the girl who married a devil because she refused to take instruction from the elders, about the devil who borrowed his body parts and came into town to marry the princess who would not listen to her parents, about twins being born on the farm, and left there because the tradition did not welcome twins, about the leopard and the antelope, the leopard or the lion and the deer or about the monkey whose lover, a beautiful woman in town ended up cooking him when her husband brought him home for meat, etc. etc. We grew up on those tales that were not meant just for the sake of storytelling, but for teaching, for educating girls and boys about responsibility, stories meant to help us conquer the world with our bare hands. Those stories were passed down to us over the centuries, often changing to adapt to newer cultures and newer societies.
Storytelling is an African way of life and drama is African. We know of drama when the war dancer comes to town and performs, when the harvest time is here and everyone gathers before the village square and performs. We did not have to borrow drama from the west nor did we borrow the story or the tale or the myth. We did not borrow poetry and music either. All of our worldview revolves around poetry. Our praise names and praise songs, our tales are seasoned with beautiful songs and poetic proverbs; our entire existence as Africans is poetically rhythmic, therefore, poetry is ours. We were born by the fireside storytelling, the reciting of proverbs and sayings; we were born in the midst of elders shouting parables and old and young women singing or crying dirges during burial ceremonies, all of which form the basis of our worldview and our storytelling.
Now dig deep inside and let’s get out the stories.
Here is the difference between how we were brought up and where we are now: We now find ourselves in a global world, living in the western world, with the western worldview; therefore, we must adapt our storytelling so that our stories remain ours in a more global Diaspora world. Our stories must be ours while they retain the ability to cross borders and oceans. How does one do that?
Let’s look briefly at the structure of a poem. A poem, we know is written in VERSE OR STANZA. What else did you see in your home village or town that originates or is in verse?
If you are familiar with the African culture, you know that there is verse everywhere in our day to day living. The songs from our tales are verse, the war songs, harvest songs, play songs, and the praise songs are all in verse. They are in free verse; therefore, you have that poetic upbringing.
I remember spending some years in my home village. When we were pounding rice during my three years in my home village as a child, our grandmother or aunt or some village woman would recite praise names with singing, and we worked harder just because they sang these rhythms. When the farmers were farming, they sang work songs. These were poems. When some renowned person died, the village hired a dirge singer who sang dirges for days, reciting stories about the great one that had just died. All of these were poems because of their use of metaphors and language, the exploration of figurative language, the line, sound and rhythm, and because they actually explored the beauty of art through the use of all of these devices.
The song, the dirge, the saying, the praise song, the war song, the work song, and the call song are all VERSE. They may be oral, but they are in verse.
A poem is a poem not because someone arranges it to look like a poem. It is poem because of what it achieves for the reader. It is, because the reader can feel, see, hear, and enjoy something profound about the way the writer says what she or he has to say. It is a work of art, like a painting, like a song, it brings about some kind of enjoyment and becomes larger than what it has said.
What has your own poem said that causes someone to sigh on hearing you read it?
Is it the political point of view that you wish to express through your poem that you depend on to draw in your audience? Or do you depend on the art of literature instead? What words, images, beauty of language did you explore so that when you read your poem, someone turns a head and says, “Oh, my!”
Hearing a good poem read is like hearing the tone of a song or listening to someone pound a certain beat of a drum. It is a song that speaks to the soul. A poem can and must do that.
But if it should do that, the audience must understand what that song or that story has to say. Some writers believe that poetry should be difficult to understand and impossible to digest. Com’on! A poem should be as clear as water and as sweet as a banana without being as soft as a banana or having the liquidity of water.
What is it that your poem is trying to convey to the reader? Why do you think what you have to say deserves an audience? What makes what you have just written different from the way someone on the roadside can say the same thing? Why should anyone read your poetry? These are some of the basic questions each writer must ask of himself or herself if that writer wants to succeed.
WORKSHOP EXERCISE
Now, write a poem in two verses, using two things I have discussed.
Utilize three vivid concrete images to write about something so that anyone hearing a line from your poem can feel your poem. Structure your lines so that the sound and the feeling the reader gets takes them to a level of feeling they never knew.
In a short story, like a poem, the storyteller has an imagination that must be expressed. The storyteller writes in prose instead of in verse, but both of the two are intended to explore the beauty of words so that they do more than ordinary words can do. So the storyteller sets up the characters, the setting, the tone, the plot, all of which are essential to creating life. The storyteller, like the poet, is pretending to be this God out there who decides on who should and who should not be, what they ought to be and what they must do to be what they ought to be. So the storyteller creates tension and sets up the characters in a time and place, and after all is done and said, we read the story and feel its impact and its beauty. The storyteller is not interested in being informative, since passing on information is not the point of storytelling; the storyteller is interested in making us feel just as much as the poet is interested in creating feelings. The playwright does the same thing a poet does. The playwright creates scenes, and depends heavily on plot like the storyteller, where the poet depends on images and the line. Both the play and the story are concerned with plot and dialogue to achieve their purpose. The play needs to be performed in order for it to achieve its purpose unlike the story. For the playwright to fulfill the purpose of his or her play, the written play must be performed before an audience. The playwright depends on the audience far more than the poet or the storyteller. We will focus on each individual genre as the series progresses.
What is interesting about the creative writer’s place is that each writer is gifted more in one or two areas of the three genres. No two genres are the same even though all of them are literary art.
BEGINNINGS
Where do stories, poems, or plays come from and who are you writing for?
Stories come from inside us or should first come from inside us. In order to create a story or a poem, I must dig inside myself, my past, my life as it was as a child, as an adolescent, and as a young woman, as a mother, a wife, a teacher, as an individual in another country other than my birth country, as a woman living in the hills of Pennsylvania, a mother of teenagers, as a Grebo woman, coming from very strong and stubborn women, as a product of a very strong and opinionated father, as a daughter who was partly reared by a single mother, as a daughter who has already lost her mother.
What are your stories and where do they come from?
Looking outside for the first story or the first poem is a difficult thing just as hiding who you are as a writer is. You cannot write effectively unless you are willing to be vulnerable. If you cannot know yourself, you cannot know your characters. If you hide from yourself, you will not see the images around you that impress themselves upon you. A poet or a story writer must see far more than an ordinary person, but whatever we see is reflected from our inner person.
Who are you writing for?
I have read stories by fellow Liberians that usually blow me away. Many of us are seeking to write the ultimate Liberian story that is authentic to the bone. That is a good thing. What I worry about, however, is that some of the stories I read are really only intended to be read by people living in Liberia, in fact, by just a few of those living in Liberia.
How can we now write so that we write for everyone, so our stories can be read both at home and in the Diaspora? What we need to understand is that Liberians are now no longer just Africans. We are now all over the globe due to the many years of civil war. Therefore, one has to write the same stories about growing up in the village, but now, we must use a diction that is accessible to a more global audience. I do not mean that when you have an African word that is not translatable, you must force a translation. I mean that a short story must conform to the rules of a short story and cannot be written as if it were a tale or a folk story. I also mean that sometimes one must change the colloquial in the narrative and allow only the characters to use the dialect or the Liberian colloquial. This allows the story to transcend its ordinary borders to reach a larger audience.
The most important point in this discussion on audience has to do with the mind of the writer.
What is your worldview about yourself? Are you still writing in that colonial worldview of the “country boy” who found “civilization” when the “white man” came with his “kwee ways?” If your entire novel is written both in its title and in its storyline or your poetry seeks to put your culture down and exalt the western culture just as in the days of old, then who is your audience? All over the world, both the western person and the non-western person are dead sick of that same old patronizing and condescending attitude in writing. I have seen many titles of Liberian stories that already reflect to me that the authors need first to reexamine their worldview about themselves before beginning to write. When I look at a book, I examine its title first. If the title says “Native Boy Finds Life,” I wonder why I should want to read about a “native boy,” when the word, “native,” lost its true meaning long ago, and now has a connotative meaning that is more derogatory than the word really should mean. But often, I continue to read, and then discover that the writer really means that this “native,” meaning “uncivilized,” “barbarian,” meaning, “African,” found a good life when his “missionary” family “rescued” him from “savagery.” That sort of writing has passed away, but many are still enslaved to it and still portray themselves in this light.
On a close examination of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, so far, one of the most successful African novels in the world, you will see that Achebe neither apologizes for the culture of the story nor for his criticism of the European invasion of Africa. He lays it out, and the reader can still enjoy the authentic African ways of thinking, the culture that is being explored, the beauty and power of Achebe’s style of language, even while understanding that what the author shows is a people at peace with their own ways of life before the invasion by the Europeans. The writer that Achebe is, is not concerned with trying to explain why the culture is the way it is.
Often, my students will take the story out of its setting and out of its frame of reference into the western frame of reference to examine the roles of women vs. the roles of men and the African culture from the western perspective. I usually tell them to give me a comparable western novel from that period so we can examine the treatment of women within their culture, using the African frame of reference as they just did with Achebe’s novel. And after all is said and done, I let my students see that Things Fall Apart belongs to African Literature and to a specific cultural reference, and their American or English novel belongs to either American literature or English literature, and nothing else about culture matters because the two are not supposed to be the same other than the fact that they are all novels. Many Liberians, unlike most other Africans, have always hated their own ways of life because of the scars of history; therefore, many writers have this internal hatred of their own culture and still seek to frown on their own tradition.
Who is your audience? The writer of poetry, fiction, and drama is guided by their worldview, something that forms the basis of the structure of their ideas. If that worldview is skewed by an internalized hatred, the work we produce will be scarred and flawed, and therefore handicapped in its ability to reach a much larger audience. In order to effectively portray character and to write authentically for an audience, the writer therefore, must first understand their own inner person and their own individual worldview. Writing is liberating, and must be liberating for both the writer and the reader. If your writing enslaves your mind or the minds of others, or if your mind enslaves your writing, then it is time to examine not just your lines or your characterization, themes, or plot, not just your images and your metaphors. It is time to examine your mind. One way to do this is to read authentic writing that speaks to your tradition even as you grow as a writer.
Copyright © Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
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