Stepping into the void…

In my first ever Gotham class on the art of writing memoir, I was introduced to a wonderful teacher, Elizabeth Cohen, published author of memoir, poetry and non-fiction works, and creative writing professor.

Over ten sessions, Elizabeth introduced us to using the finesse and tools of fiction to tell our stories. Our stories can’t just be a recounting in chronological order of an event or time – X happened, then Y, which then led to Z. Instead, we need to make conscious decisions about word choice and sentence structure and use figurative language to establish mood, images, and meaning.

I was intimidated by the notion of trying to write in a literary way, after all, my creative writing ambition previously, was to be a screenwriter, the whole essence of which is to pair things down to succinct descriptions and catchy dialogue that moves the plot forward.

My first ever exercise from class, was writing compelling descriptions. Our task was to write a description of a place we remembered well, a significant place, a place important to the story we wanted to tell.

This is what I wrote, the very first sentences that eventually would end up in one of my chapters.

The House on Oduduwa Crescent

The house hovers ghost-like, stripped of its paint and sheen, a shadow of its former self. It stands where it always stood, but now a poster child for dilapidation, an oddity amidst the rows of mansions shaded by palms and frangipani. 

The walls, the colour of dullest grey, scream out for a lick of whitewash. The gravel, which once lined the path leading up to the front door, is evident only by a few pebbles scattered here and there. The flowerpots have all burst, as if the roots of the plants were so dispirited, they pushed their way through the terracotta, in search of air and sanity. The perfectly manicured beds of acalypha and croton are long since dead, and in their place, are weeds, aggressive and vicious, growing every which way.

Every journey starts with a single step, these two paragraphs were the start of my memoir journey.