MY WRITING JOURNEY by 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.
