How To Write About A Thing Or A Thought | Otareri Samuel

At this time, you have owned that thing or thought. And it is owning you too, with every word of it you pen, every sentence like the limbs of a sketched superhero that you cloak, you would begin to see, not just a flat landscape, or a broken single mother of one, but you see also the trees and the birds nesting in them, the bark and the ants leaving in them.

Indeed, you begin to see, the single mother and her daughter at school, her pumping heart and the hunger she feels, her fingernails and the gap in her teeth, the man that left her to go after another one, her mother and the neighbour who saw it all.

Everything.

To tell a story about another, be they material or imagined, you must see not just the two sides to the coin of their life, because two sides, is just the truth and the lie, the black and white, the night and the day. And the head and the tail. Those are not enough. Not sufficiently definitive enough.

You must go into the grey.

Into the wasteland of their existence, there is where they are found when they are lost and that is where they are truly themselves.
Out in that wilderness, the coin has at least 720 sides.

So you see, there is no shortage of what to talk about.

The dumb kid is actually a genius. He kills a butterfly to prove that hell isn’t behind the walls of the walls. A cheating husband sneaks into bed, but finds that his wife left him a long time ago: she’s been dead in that bed for 3 weeks, but he is too busy shagging an 18-year-old to notice every time he comes home.

One danger though.

You must not lose your way in that maze. Once you do, no one can find you, except you. Therein lies the confusion:

Are you lost in your own self, or in the consciousness of the character you have created? Who are you writing about, the material, you, or the immaterial someone else?