How did you become a writer?
Through being an avid reader from my earliest childhood in Nigeria. My parents’ house was full of books that mostly stayed packed up in boxes in the spare room because we moved quite a bit but those spare rooms became my personal library. I was most fascinated with the encyclopedias -- they were so big and shiny and full of fascinating facts and pictures. So my imagination was already wandering far and wide by age 5. It was, I think, a natural progression that at some point I also wanted to write stories of my own. I had a childhood phase of filling up notebooks with imitation Moomintroll stories. Then, in secondary school, at about age 13, my literature teacher loaned me a thesaurus and I finally understood the power and magic of words. I wrote a poem for the school play at the time but then didn’t write anything again until I was in England studying law. I got the wild notion to buy an electric typewriter, then banged out a short story and mailed it to a popular magazine, probably addressed “To whom it may concern.” Of course I didn’t hear back! I had no clue how any of it worked at the time.
Fast forward a few years later and I’d moved to Stanford University in the US where my husband was studying. There, the CCIS (Community Committee for International Students) which had a Spouse Education Fund to help international spouses or partners with financial need, gave me a small grant to take an online writing class. It was magical and eye-opening. The teacher of that class, Jacinda Townsend, was absolutely amazing and very encouraging. One of my classmates even said she’d missed her train stop reading my story!
Then we moved again, to Boston, and I was faced with a crossroads: Law school or MFA? Law school meant an expensive undertaking that might not pay off if we didn’t remain in the USA. Writing on the other hand…anyway, the fates seemed to be nudging me gently but firmly in the direction I’d wanted to go all my life! I applied to Lesley University’s MFA program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was accepted. I learned so much there about the craft of writing! Just before graduating, I got the germ of the idea that would become An Ordinary Wonder, my debut novel. It would take many years for it to get written and published though, as I had to go back and train for a whole other career that allowed me to earn money. Still, I never lost sight of the fact that writing is what that gives me the most joy in existing.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I truly believe that English and literature teachers and librarians are the best friends of introverted children with their noses permanently in a book, like I was. My secondary school and high school teachers were all phenomenal educators who were also the kindest people.
My writing is influenced by so much because my reading was and remains beyond eclectic! Growing up, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Death and The King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, and The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi all enthralled and traumatized me in the best possible way -- they made me understand how you can make people keep feeling things long after they’ve closed the pages of a book. My earliest literary influences were largely African writers, at the same time as I was reading the English classics like Moll Flanders alongside inhaling Agatha Christie mysteries. I will forever be grateful for the Pacesetter novels -- they were love stories, detective stories. There were spies and heists and more, all written about African society by African authors. They were fun, cinematic, and relatable to my experience of my surroundings. I was also reading stories like Boule De Suif by Guy De Maupassant, and feeling so mad at the hypocrisy and injustice we mete out to each other just to appear to belong to a “better” group or “higher class” of people! More recently The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi was astounding! A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K Jemisin was a treat. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy blew my mind. I loved The Stranding by Kate Sawyer, Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez and, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner, and The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper. I recently finished The Interdependency, a series by John Scalzi, and feel quite lost without Lady Kiva Lagos to brighten my days while swearing up a storm! Like I said, eclectic!
So many mentors influenced my writing during and after my studies at Lesley University’s MFA program: Michael Lowenthal, Tony Eprile, and Laurie Foos were my main ones. I also attend as many writers retreats and workshops as I can, and have learned invaluable things from authors like Trevor Corson and Chris Abani. All have really contributed more than I can say towards my becoming a published writer.
When and where do you write?
I write mostly in my study at home, especially when I’m in the planning stages of a book. When I need to go intensely inward to write a first draft, I usually go away to some sort of retreat and pretty much turn slightly feral while I live in the world of my novel and nothing else exists. I could subsist on soup and water during that time and not care because I don’t notice much outside of this new creation that that is frantic to exist outside my body and mind. I am unable to write in a café as I find the noise and movement too distracting, plus I tend to mutter and even gesticulate when I am feeling my way around words, which I imagine might not go over too well! When I am in the editing stages, I am happier to work in a library and have a bit more awareness of my surroundings
What are you working on now?
Because it took a good long while for my first book to be completed and become published, I have a backlog of ideas and works in progress. I thrive best when working on several things at once. Right now, I am very focused on writing a novel which is really exciting and I really can’t say much more except that I really look forward to introducing these characters and their singularly astounding predicament to the world.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Not so much a block as the occasional period when something stops me from feeling that I have the right to write. I have to constantly fight the idea that writing is something I must do only at the convenience of everything else happening. And so if there is anything significant pulling at my attention, my brain goes into its own mode of “block” and the words cease to flow. It tends to be more a result of conditioning than actual circumstances. If I somehow get past, or manage to trick that voice into silence, I am usually good to go. I don’t automatically set word counts every single day but I try to write for as long as I can in any one sitting. And so some days I do research and just make notes, and some days I write thousands of words, and some days just a couple of hundred. That “blind-folded” stage of the writer’s journey is part of the deal, however tortuously it meanders.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
To know the difference between “building” and “scaffolding” -- this was from Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing, when I took a class with her at the Fine Arts Work Center. My novel-in-progress was at the time weighed down because it included everything plus the proverbial kitchen sink. She helped me really understand that there were details I had needed to know as the author but that the reader didn’t. Things a reader would actually thank the writer for trusting them to intuit. I had to figure out what was the story and what was supporting the writing of the story. Now when I write, I am conscious that I will put down a lot that is just for me to know -- which is a bit like hewing the ideal block of stone out from the rock face -- and then I must follow that up with the actual work of freeing the David from the marble, so to speak, leaving him finely honed with no more than the usual number of limbs.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Write! Write! Write! “You cannot shave a man’s head in his absence,” is a Yoruba proverb I interpret to mean, “You cannot edit or publish what you have not written.” You have to put words on the page. It doesn’t matter if they are far from perfect. A little or a lot at a time, again it doesn’t matter, just write. (Proverbs are part of the Nigerian way of life and feature prominently in my novel, An Ordinary Wonder. For more, check out more at my literary proverbs Twitter, @AfSayings).
Also, read widely and study the craft of writing to become better at it. Above all, do not give up and do not give in if you really mean to one day be published. Rest awhile from being bashed around then get up, take a deep breath, and plunge back in. If you have something to share with the world as a writer, keep at it. Keep learning how to be better at it. Keep going. You will get there.
Buki Papillon was born in Nigeria, the oldest of six. After studying law at Hull University in the UK, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has received several fellowships and awards for her writing and is an alumnus of Key West Literary, Vermont Studio Centre and Vona Voices residencies and workshops. Her work was published in Post Road Magazine and the Del Sol Review. She has in the past been a travel adviser, events host and chef. She is the author of An Ordinary Wonder, a novel about an intersex Nigerian teenager forced to live as a boy. It received praise in the New York Times as a story which “highlights the limiting dangers of the gender binary, while also reminding us of the power storytelling has to help us envision a more expansive and inclusive world.” Buki currently lives in Boston, where she is resigned to finding inspiration in the long winters. Her website is https://www.bukipapillon.com. Follow her @bukipapillon on Twitter.
