An essential handbook for African creatives

Goretti Kyomuhendo’s book The Essential Handbook for African Creative Writers is, as the Foreword by Prof. Arthur Shatto Gakwandi says, in not so many words, a sharing of the personal experiences of a novelist that may serve as lessons for emerging and established writers.

More pithily, it is part memoir and part toolkit, adds Prof.Michael Cawood Green in the book’s introduction.

First of all, let us get our facts straight: this Writers’ Guide is essentially for African creative writers, but its lessons apply to those non-African writers who wish to communicate with an African audience or communicate the African experience to a non-African audience.

In order to crystallize this universally singular purpose, the author begins by telling us about her journey as a writer.

While growing up in Hoima, her home district, the writer was exposed to such books as Enid Blyton’s adventure story books and other works of foreign literature.

However, the author soon found that these books talked about “things that I had never seen before or eaten in my entire life”, she reveals.

It was only after reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart that was she able to identify with the characters and events found in what she read.

The book spoke to her in such a personal way that she reached out to Achebe only to be replied by his silence, as it were.

Years later, she met Achebe while on a trip to London in 1998.

Before that, she saw her first novel, The First Daughter, launched in December 1996 after a nail-bitingly long wait, at least by her lights.

The late Alex Bangirana, the then Publishing Editor of Fountain Publishers, in tandem with SNV-Netherlands Development Organisation were central to this milestone.

She also shares the role she played in the beginnings of FEMRITE-Uganda Women Writers’ Association, among other laurels to her growing reputation as a redoubtable literary figure.

That was Part One, in Part Two she telegraphs the Essential Writing Techniques in the shape of Plot, Character Building, Point of View, Setting, Dialogue, Diction, Style as literary locomotives that drive a writer to show and not simply tell when rendering a story.

You know when you read a book that seemingly starts at the end of a story? Yes? Well that is what they call a Flashback Plot.

There’s so much here to learn, so we shall winnow the absolutely essential tips from the essential tips.

Not that there is such a hierarchy, some tips being more equal than others, it is just that this review cannot possibly cover every base in this book without turning into a book itself!

“Your duty as a writer is to transport your readers to this location,” the author instructs as a means to a story’s setting giving its characters context.

There are exercises here to make sure you understand what the author hopes to bring into the realm of the reader’s somewhat singular comprehension.

Speaking of singularity, in Part Three the author shares some writing tips and these start with the Courage to write.

You may ask courage for what? I am not trying to be arrested like Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, you add.

Well, writing demands that you show yourself, often in full psychic undress. Your heart and soul are windowed by your words, after all.

This courage is like a gateway to a number of other tips. One of which is reading.

Writing and reading are correlative acts of the mind, so you really cannot do one without the other if your object is to be a creative writer.

This tip, among several others, is essential in that reading is like the seed and the seedbed from whence your words may blossom, at full flower.

Part Four, Frequently Asked Questions, brings us to a miscellany of questions and how they relate to creative writing.

Here, again, personal experiences buttress instructional guideposts to point the aspiring as well as accomplished writer to overcoming such stumbling blocks as writer’s block.

You’ll be glad to learn that familiarity does not only breed contempt, it may also provide the fodder from which the imagination may be roused towards surmounting writer’s block.

The author also gives the reader information on reputable publishers, writers’ associations, writers’ residences as well as Grants, Fellowships and Literary Prizes for African writers. 

Author: Goretti Kyomuhendo

Title: The Essential Handbook for African Creative Writers

Pages: 111

Price: 6 Pounds Sterling

Availability: Amazon UK

Published: 2013