MY WRITING JOURNEY
ADEBAYO CALEB
‘Caleb, Caleb’ the familiar voice would call ‘What are you doing inside? You should go play with your friend Gbenga. He’s here’
That was my mum’s voice as she called from the kitchen where she tried to fix something for herself and Mrs Onasanya, our very good family friend and the mother of the Gbenga my mum was referring to. She always wondered what I was doing in my room when I ought to be playing with my friends. I was seven years old, and I was already a writer.
Writing for me, came almost as natural as breathing. The experience began when I was seven. That was when I wrote my first piece. It was a children fiction, with a lot of grammatical errors and crayon drawings. I drew what I imagined in my head, and looking at them felt some sort of accomplishment. Writing became an addiction.
My mum never actually knew that the addiction I had to writing was her fault. At a very young age, she had built a very ardent reading habit in me that could not easily be broken. She stocked the house with books; ladybird books and Enid Blyton’s series and kept me reading them and asking for more. While other kids our age got Xboxes and Play stations, we got to feed our imagination with reading foreign authors.
I can vividly remember the first story I wrote. That night, I tore out pages from a school notebook from the previous school year. I tore out a middle page and made it form the cover and back page. I wrote out the title on the cover page, and drew a very funny picture with red, blue and green crayons. This was what I did over the next few years while mum wondered what I was always doing holed up in the room, instead of playing outside with Gbenga.
And so over the next three years or so, I wrote the same kind of works, with my imagination growing wider as I advanced in years. By the age of eleven, however, I quit using the picture illustrations and used only words to convey my message. This was because, I had started reading novels without pictures, and somehow learnt that books without pictures were more mature. So I moved from children fiction to true, adult fiction.
Where I grew up, writing was never considered a profession; it was either you were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer or something of the sort- not a writer, so despite my addiction to writing, I couldn’t call writing a profession, because no other student mentioned it in school when asked what they wanted to be in future. However, I dreamt real hard of publishing my books (even the baby ones I wrote). I desperately needed to share my thoughts with someone out there and make them see what I saw. Sadly, though, by the time I was ten, I had lost all my colour drawing stories. Either they were swept away or something, but I just couldn’t find them anymore.
My first attempt at publishing my book was when I was in my first year in High school. I met a boy in my class who said his dad had a printer, and after noticing me always writing in class, even when classes were not on, he asked me what it was I always wrote. I showed him the story I was writing at the time. He loved it and said he was going to type it and print it out for me, that I would become a published writer. I was so happy and I gave him the draft of the work. Every day at school, I would ask him how it was going. Soon, he began bringing pages of the work to school-printed pages. This was the first time I was seeing my work on print, and I was so excited about it. The excitement didn’t last long anyway because this boy came to me one day and told me that the ink in his dad’s printer was finished and he couldn’t print anymore. At first, I was mad at him and felt he was lying because he didn’t want to help me anymore. I asked him to bring the draft I gave him to school the next day. He brought it, however incomplete as some of the pages I gave him were missing. Now I was really mad. That day, I cried. An opportunity at publishing was defeated.
Another opportunity presented itself when my school launched its annual magazine and called for entries. Immediately, I wrote a story and sent to the school magazine. Soon, the issue was out and I rushed to get it. I was so overwhelmed with joy when I saw my article in a corner of a page, in between two bolder articles written by senior high students, almost unnoticeable. I was happy however, that I, a grade 7 junior high student could be published on a magazine. That was my first incentive in writing.
Years later, I added something to my writing- Poetry. As a student of literature in high school, I hated poetry. It always seemed so complex and hard to comprehend. It was then so surprising to me that in my final year of high school, I wrote my first poem. I was amazed, and excited at the same time that I had extended my writing boundaries. This was my second incentive in writing.
Three years after high school, while in college, studying law, I won my first award as a writer in a national magazine essay competition. I screamed when the call came in that I had won, and this gave me my third incentive in writing.
And so the little seven year old who wrote children fiction with coloured crayons, and never played outside with Gbenga is growing to be an award-winning writer of essays, fiction of all sorts and poems, with writing still an addiction.
My Funny stories 3
ADEBAYO CALEB
"The most interesting Christmas story"
As a growing boy, I loved the yuletide season as it was celebrated in my family. It was a season I always looked forward to because it held so many pleasant things for me. At such time, we had so much food at our disposal and friends were around to spice up the celebrations. I was the youngest one in the family and got so many new clothes which mum always bought for me from the mall during the season. For me, as a child, yuletide was heaven on earth.
My heaven on earth was razed with fire almost literally when I was in JS1. I failed my mid-term tests woefully that October, while feeling indifferent as I expectantly looked forward to the yuletide.
Surprise greeted me in person of my mother when I came back home one afternoon and she announced to me that if I did badly in my exams that term, I wasn’t going to have the things I normally had for the yuletide.
Yuletide had just become a nightmare for me.
‘This isn’t happening’ I had said to myself. I had worked so hard inviting friends I had just made at the school to my home for our Chicken fest. There was no way I was going to ‘fall my hand’. I needed to put a plan in place, and it definitely wasn’t a reading plan.
There were two things we did for the New Year that gave me so much excitement. First was the New Year Rush and Grab, and second was the New Year Chicken Fest. The Rush and Grab was something we did from the last hour of the 31st night of the old year. For about an hour, we would sit around a bonfire outside our house and recount the year with relatives and friends. We would eat small chops and take soft drinks while the adult took swigs of beer. The drinking made the talking easier. Jokes would be cracked, coarse stories would be told and memories of sad and good times will be recounted. A line would be made on the ground with Christmas lights while all this was on and everybody had to remain behind the line until it was 0000hrs. A few minutes before the New Year, we would put out the bonfire, get rid of our bottles and leftovers and get ready to cross the line. Usually, the first person to cross the line once 0000hrs struck and run to find the New Year treasure which was always written in a paper would read it and get the gift that was written there. I had won once (or, been allowed to win) and that had gotten me a bicycle.
The New Year Chicken Fest was another festival of its own. It was a galore of all sort of meat at the lunch table. It was a sumptuous meal where you were allowed to eat as much as you wanted, and what you wanted. Even the kids were allowed to take wine as they pleased. However, if a child had done something bad, his plate of food would be dished for him and he would be given a cup of soda or Ribena and that would be all. I would usually laugh when I imagine how that would feel with everyone tearing at the different stock of meat at the table and with so much food to go round.
The thought of these two events, and the friends I had invited to enjoy them with me made me get creative even faster and soon, I had a plan.
On the last day of school, when results were usually given out, our form teacher shared all the results out. I didn’t even bother opening mine since I knew it couldn’t be good and that hardly even bothered me. I already had a solid plan. On getting home, mum did not fail to ask for the term’s result. Being the first result I would receive from that school, it made my plan even work more smoothly.
‘The principal said that the school doesn’t give results for the first term until the second term, so we weren’t given our results, but my form master told me I did very well in the exam scores he was compiling’ Every word of that was a lie. I tried to scan my mother’s face to see if she was drinking this all in, and it looked like it. Just to secure my position, I added ‘I even heard that the principal is travelling out of the country till next term, so nobody will be able to reach her on her phone’ I was getting better at this. I took a peek at my mum’s face and I felt like a superstar’ If God should come at that time, I knew I would be first on the list of hell occupants.
I didn’t hear a word about the result until 31st December that year. As soon as it was nearing the midnight hour, I put away everything as did others and we put out the bonfire. The line made with Christmas lights was already set and I was desperately ready to cross it. ‘This year I should get a play station’, I thought happily. As our alarms sounded to signify the 0000hr, I picked up speed to get to the line. Not looking back, I crossed it and ran ahead to get the treasure. I searched around frantically until I found the piece of paper. It was only at that moment that I looked back to find every body standing outside the line unmoving from their spot. I was perplexed but I managed to laugh as I turned back to pick up the piece of paper. As I opened it, I saw it was my report card and written boldly above it was ‘Happy New Year’. I was the twenty third out of twenty four students. Yuletide was officially messed up. I fainted.
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