Oh Yes I M Single Novel Pdf

[Shari Alvine]

Iwas also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.

And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

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James Clear writes about habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. The book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 60 languages.

My intention was to write a single novel, but as I write, it has clearly evolved into what I can only imagine will be a monster (at least 200,000-250,000 words, which is somewhere around 800-1,000(!) pages) of a book. As I didn't want to release a tome so early in my career as a writer, it naturally led me to consider the option of releasing the story as a series (perhaps a trilogy, without meaning to sound clichd).

However, this will obviously come with its own problems, such as having to think about how to split one large story into three smaller stories which carry on from one another without wanting the readers of the first two stories to feel as if each respective installment has been ended abruptly in an attempt by me as an author to squeeze more money out of them.

I have been told by a number of published authors that my story is, and I quote, "really very good indeed" and each had expressed surprise. One author said, "Actually, this is very good stuff!" Therefore, I don't want to ruin that effect by releasing it in multiple volumes, but I also don't want to deter (or even bore) my readers with a single, enormous book.

Naturally, one the first draft is finished, I will redraft and will chop and change a lot of it, but the finished article will still be immense (hence my earlier estimate of 200,000-250,000 words), but this still leaves me with a 200,000 word book in the best case.

Everything I say is true only for the most common, average case. In publishing, everything is possible. The more it deviates from the norm, the rarer it will become. But that does not mean it is impossible.

There are one volume editions of the Lord of the Rings or the Bible. This is proof that big fat books of over a thousand pages are being published, sold and (possibly even) read. But these books are expensive to produce and distribute, and publishers like to minimize possible losses when publishing first novels by unknown authors, when they don't know how the public will react to the book. It might be a total flop, despite being a great book, simply because the hype is elsewhere.

Therefore, generally first authors have a hard time selling anything over 100,000 words. Publisher prefer to test the waters with a standalone book that is within the common range of word count for that genre. For a good overview, see Jennifer Laughran's Wordcount Dracula (for YA) and Colleen Lindsay's On word counts and novel length (for adult fiction), and use Google.

A feasible strategy might be to finish this book and then write something else to publish first. But that does not mean that you shouldn't submit this project to agencies and/or publishers. If it is as objectively good as your professional test readers say, you might even convince a publisher. But chances are that they will recognize its valor and then reply to you that they like it but want you to write something else first. It is quite common that publishers read a manuscript and then contract the author for another book, yet to be written. That does not mean that the first book won't get published, only that publishers think it is better to not publish it as a first novel.

In genre fiction, you should always expect to be asked to rewrite (part of) your novel. At this point, you won't know if the publisher sees your work as a series, a fat standalone, or would require it to be shortened to a slim one-volume. Of course there are precendents, and what has sold well will probably be easy to sell a second time, but you should always write your book and then work with the publisher to make it marketable, later. Agents say they want to read "finished" manuscripts, but in publishing it is a measure of your professionality how well you are able to let go of a version of your work and rewrite it all over again.

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