Creatives deserve better financial outcomes – Servio Gbadamosi

• Servio Gbadamosi, a poet, a writer, and the publisher of Noirledge Publishing, says creatives deserve better financial outcomes
• He stated that, though some of the works published by his firm have won notable awards, he intends to build the firm into a media powerhouse that is unafraid to take on and support bold African stories
• In an exclusive three-part interview with TheRadar, Gbadamosi also shared tips on how creatives can overcome writer’s block, noting that it takes a village to raise a creative

What inspired your journey into creative writing and book publishing?

I don’t think I came to writing first. I think radio was an essential part of my childhood years. It was the primary source of information and entertainment. In my household, TV was a luxury that came at the tail end of my teenage years. So, the radio was really my go-to platform for both information and entertainment. So in my junior secondary school days, when my older siblings started pestering me, around JS2, JS3, I was quite brilliant then. They started questioning me, ‘Would you like to go into sciences or commercial, or arts’ and everything. I was just like, ‘I’m not interested in all of this.’ ‘Would you like to be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, an accountant?’ Those things were not interesting to me.

So one day, out of curiosity, I think it must have been at the end of a news broadcast on the radio or something. I then began to ask if the people who work in these radio stations do they go to school? They said, yes, they go to school. So if they go to school, do they go to universities? They said yes. So what do they study in the university? They said journalism, some said broadcasting, some said Mass Comm; things around communication arts, language and communication arts. So I said, ok, I think that is what I want to do.

And somehow, somehow, I don’t know how I came up with that notion. I sort of had that notion that journalists, radio broadcast journalists at that point in my life. I sort of had that notion that they knew everything, especially the newscasters. So they come at the dedicated hours of the day to come and give us tidbits so that in a few hours thereafter, they would also come with something new to tell us. So I wanted to be that person who had something new to say, somebody who knew about everything, who would be that authority figure. Not like I wanted to lord it over my peers or anything, but just that joy of knowing and being able to share what you know with the world was what fascinated me.

And I remember my elder brother and my immediate elder brother took me around a couple of counsellors in my JSS3 who were trying to counsel me. Even after my junior WAEC results came out, they were trying to persuade me to say, Oh, your result is really good. Somebody like you should be in the sciences. I kept on insisting that, no, what I want is to be a journalist. I want to be on the radio. I want to be in the newspaper. I want to know about everything. So finally, some of the counsellors advised me and my mother, who I really grew up with, to leave the poor boy. It seems he is hell-bent on studying this thing. Leave him, let him find his own path. And somehow they trusted that counsel and allowed me to just go after what I believed was... even though I didn’t know what was in stock at that point in time. They allowed me to just pursue that fascination with knowing and acquiring knowledge and sharing it that I had.

Then I was lucky. I went to three secondary schools. In the second secondary school, we didn’t have a Literature teacher. When I moved in my SS2 to the third secondary school, there was a teacher named... I keep forgetting his first name, but his surname was Raheem. This man was sold out to his job, and he poured himself into us. I don’t think there’s anybody in my set or the one before us that failed Literature because it’s almost impossible for that man to have taught you and you failed. This is a man who would even fix extra classes on weekends at no cost. We were just in SS2 and SS3, we didn’t even have money. We couldn’t even afford to buy pure water in those days. So it wasn’t for any fringe benefit that he would get. But I don’t know what his motivation was or anything, but he poured himself and all that he knew into us. And I think everybody in my set passed. You could fail other subjects, but you were not allowed to fail Literature because that man, it was impossible for that man to have taught you, and you will fail. Something has to be fundamentally wrong with you.

But still, I didn’t see myself as maybe being a writer or anything at that point in my life. Then I got into Olabisi Onabanjo University as a Diploma student studying Mass Communication and I was bored. I didn’t know what to expect from university. I just finished secondary school a few months after I was in the university and I didn’t know what to expect. They just told me that’s the next phase in your life. And then I moved on with it. So I didn’t know what to expect. I had so much time on my hands. My mother was not there to give me instructions. And I felt people were having fun. I wasn’t interested in those things. So I was bored. So I think after the first semester or thereabout, during the holidays, I came home and then I went back to my books; the literature texts, the novels, the plays, because my mother was big on literature, even though I misused, misplaced, lost a lot of these books, but my mother was big on all of those things and I would pick them up and read them. So I just went back home during the holidays and when I was returning to school, I packed a big Ghana-Must-Go bag, the biggest there was in the house, filled with books, literature texts – Gulliver’s Travels, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare plays. Till now, my mom can still quote passages from Shakespeare, and this is somebody who has not read Shakespeare in over 50 years, but she could quote whole passages, whole dialogues from Shakespeare. And she has not even read a page of Shakespeare in over 50 years.

So I took all those things to school and I started; it became like my life during those Diploma days. I would read, read, read. I didn’t understand most of what I was reading then, but I was just reading them. And as it is with reading, after a while, I began looking for a place to vent. Those things I was reading started looking for an outlet. I would read some passages and I would say, ‘Yeah, I can hit this now. This is good now. I can create something like this now.’ And I started aping some of those great works that I had read. I read a lot of the pace setter series, too. I read Harlequin romance, Mills and Boons, Nancy Drew mystery series, Eagle romance series, Alan Cotterman, King Solomon’s Mines. I read all of those things and I began by aping some of those things that I have read. And gradually, gradually, I got better at it. I began to share with friends, I began to come into communities of writers across the campus and even beyond. That’s basically how the journey started.

At what point did you decide to go into book publishing?

So, at what point did I decide to go into book publishing? I think I was a degree student then. At that point in time, I had started a club which was registered on the campus then. It was called Club Forge. It had a couple of members; I think there were about 12. So we would gather like twice a month on Saturdays. We would teach ourselves performance poetry. We would teach ourselves how to rap. We would teach ourselves how to write poetry and all of that.

I was buying newspapers every week. I was buying New Age newspapers. Then I was buying The Guardian on Friday and on Sunday just so I could read Reuben Abati’s columns. And then later I added The Guardian on Saturday. That was money I was supposed to be feeding myself with, but foolishly, I was spending the money on newspapers and all. It was in that newspaper that I then found a call for submissions. Some anthologies were going to be published and I sort of encouraged my club members to put these things together and send in entries. Some of them listened. I compiled everything and sent it out. We were lucky about a year later or thereabout, I think about three or four of us appeared in an anthology of poems. And that was it for me. I was like, ‘Ah. So I can appear in a book.’

By the time the first anthology appearance happened, I had finished a collection of poems. So I said, ‘Ah ah. What’s the next thing? Make we publish this thing now.’ So I started shopping around for publishers. Of course, I grew up in Ibadan and Ibadan is the home of publishing in Nigeria. So I came back to Ibadan. I went around all the publishers. The few that even granted me an audience at the time were just looking at me like ‘What is this one talking about? What is this one saying? Go and write a textbook and bring it back and then we’ll publish it. We’ll acquire the rights from you. You, oh, you’re a creative writer and of all the creative writing there is, it’s the only poetry that you have chosen. This one, you don’t know what to do with your life.’ So I was frustrated. I was disillusioned. I was disappointed. I even went to Lagos. There were people who were even asking for money to even reach through.

I was so unsure of myself at that point, and I just wanted feedback or somebody who could provide some sort of mentorship that could set me on the right path to being a good writer. But I didn’t quite find it, even though I was already mentoring others on campus. I didn’t quite find it. And after a while, I began to read about publishing because that was a pain that I was feeling, but I wasn’t feeling it alone; members of my club were also feeling it. And when I go out on campus, too, I would see people with similar stories. And I felt, oh, yeah, I think at some point when I graduate. I would like to help in bringing these stories to life, ameliorating the plight or the pains of writers in the creative industry.

So, that was sort of the motivation, and of course, I started working towards it gradually. I started out the journey as a distributor because we kept on trying to study the industry to see what’s lacking and we found out that there were a lot of indigenous publishing across the country, but indigenous publishing with zero distribution. So, whether you’re self-published or you’re published by a small press, it’s somewhat difficult for people to get copies of your book outside of your immediate environment. So we started as book distributors. That was a company I had started with some of my other partners then. It was collective. We started as book distributors who would liaise with indigenous authors, indigenous publishers, and we placed their books in bookstores. That was the beginning of the journey.

But, you know, that was just the beginning. What I wanted from the beginning was to be able to make books that carry our own name; books that we would proudly associate with; books that would go on into the larger world and earn a name for themselves. That was what we really wanted. It took quite some years, but I don’t regret it. This is about 13 years down the line and we’re going strong.

Looking back now at how the journey has progressed from when you started, would you say that you achieved that, or there are still some things that have not been achieved yet?

Well, I think if we think about it in terms of the milestones that we have had on this journey, it has been a worthwhile journey. Yes, we’ve also had a lot of landmark achievements. Our published titles have been nominated for prizes. They have won several prizes. They’ve won back-to-back the Nigerian Prize for Literature for the Children’s Category, first in 2019 and then in 2024. We’ve won the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize for Poetry, for Drama, for Prose, for short stories, and for children’s writing. We’ve been shortlisted, nominated for the Etisalat Prize while it was still on. We’ve been longlisted, shortlisted for the Pan-African Writers’ Prize. What more recognition would gladden our hearts on a journey like this? So I am happy, and I think it has been a worthwhile journey. I would say that we have achieved a lot.

But then, compared to the enormous task of building a viable and sustainable creative industry, which the publishing industry is a subset of in a country like Nigeria and on a continent like Africa, the journey has not begun at all. That is a daunting task that will last several lifetimes. And I think that is where I want to put my tent right now. Yes, these stories are stats. Yes, we’ve gotten some accolades from that, but then the goal now is to be able to build a larger team that can help us rightly position ourselves as one of the icons of the creative industries, not just in Nigeria, but on this continent. And that would involve us evolving from just being a book publisher into becoming a media powerhouse. A media powerhouse that is unafraid to take hold of Africa’s stories, of Nigerian stories, original stories, fantastic, bold ideas that writers and creatives have, put the system and the support, the finance and all that they need behind them and help build them into a success.

You shouldn’t have to live a life of lack and poverty just because you are a creative. You should be able to earn a living from the talent and the creative skills that you have been blessed with. So it is not enough to write a book anymore, in my opinion, and in line with the plans that we have for the future, it is not enough to write a book anymore. It is enough that that book gets recognition. We want that book to get the recognition that it deserves amongst the readership, win prizes, not just in Nigeria, not just on the African continent, worldwide. What other derivatives, what other content can that book be developed into? How can the creative person profit from it? How can the publishing house behind it profit from it? How can we build a sustainable, functional, and successful creative industry in Nigeria first? Because Nigeria is our primary constituency, it’s our primary market. How do we build that first, and then by extension, extend the same knowledge and vision to the African continent? Those are the kind of concerns and goals that I have now. It is going to evolve at some point deeply beyond publishing. This is a lifelong game; it’s a lifelong pursuit. Of course, I intend to do this while I still have the strength. And before I get to that point when I do not have the strength anymore, by God, we would have competent hands to pass on the dream to.

You mentioned prizes that your published books have won. Now, how does it feel being a publisher of books that have won several awards, the ANA Awards, the NLNG Prize for Literature, and several others?

It feels good. You feel validated, you feel seen. I say that because the job of creating, the job of publishing is done in the shadows, is done in silence, is done in solitude. It’s a lonely life and you do all of these things and you hope that you are right. You hope that the gems, the sparks you saw in those writers, in those authors, in those manuscripts, that the world gets to see them too. So you put in your best, in your closet, in our little office. Everybody who is a part of the team does what they are supposed to do to improve the quality of the work, to make sure that it has a fighting chance when it goes out into the world on its own. Everybody puts in their best. So ultimately, when you get feedback from readers, for example, and they say, ‘Oh, I like that story. Oh, I like that poem. Oh, I like that book,’ and co, you are like, ‘Ah, ok.’ You feel happy. You feel glad and that in itself is enough satisfaction.

But then some of these works then go on, they are nominated, long-listed, short-listed for prizes that they are entered for. You’re like, ah, yeah, so that brilliance that we saw, that bet that we took, other people encountered the work and saw the same thing that we saw. Oh, then we must be on to something. It means that we are doing something right.

There’s an abundance of talent and even if you put all the publishing houses that currently operate in this country together, all of us combined do not have the financial wherewithal to take on the abundance of talent and creativity that this country has to offer. So what we are doing is picking at random, and scratching the surface and we are all managing to sell a few hundred, a few thousand copies of each of the titles that we publish. But of course, if we build the industry further and we have that mutually beneficial ecosystem, I’m talking about publishers in general now, we would be able to, on the backbone and on the strength of the infrastructure, of the ecosystem that is necessary for our development, be able to boast of hundreds of thousands of copies of each title that we publish.

Again, people only get to talk about the books that are nominated, shortlisted, or have won a prize. They don’t talk about the tens of other titles that do not get any such recognitions, but which, all the same, we still had to put out. Sometimes, for one, two, three books to get recognition, we would have done 15, 20, and even more sometimes. And those 20 books, some of them, the money that went into their publication never comes back. But of course, it is a bet that you continue taking because you know that when you have one, two, three of them that succeed, you would be able to cover for the lost years and the lost funds, and co.

So it’s basically how it works; it’s a mixed feeling. Some days you are happy and elated. Other days, you are doubting yourself and saying, how are we sure that if we do six books this year that we are going to get recognition? How are we sure which one of them is going to be commercially viable? Yes, you do all your analysis, you do all your business planning, but you know when these books come out, when they go into the market, the reality is always different. There are books that we planned and hoped that we were going to sell thousands of copies of, and there are those ones that we had little or no plans for; some flopped, some succeeded. So what you do is, in retrospect, you try to connect the dots and see what lessons you can learn for the years ahead.

So it feels good when we get those nominations and prizes. You are happy. It reassures you that, yeah, you know what you are doing; you are on course. And it gives you fuel. It fuels you. It gives you the strength to continue the journey, because it’s a lonely road.

What criteria do you use in judging which books to publish and which books to go for? What informs the choice of books that you publish at Noirledge?

We usually have a small window where we take submissions from aspiring or emerging authors. That’s basically where we pitch our tents. We’re looking for diamonds in the rough. When those submissions come in, we take a look at them; study, study, study. Which one of them has a bold idea? Which one of them is unafraid to tell that bold idea? Which one of them do we feel or believe is ready and yearning for an audience?

Now, that’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is, because we also do a lot of going outs, a lot of events, a lot of participation in things happening around, you come across these gems in those places too. And then there are some of them that when we come across them, we directly solicit manuscripts from them and we say, what are you working on? Are you working on a full-length manuscript? Okay, when do you think it will be ready? When it is ready, we would like to see it. And then of course we see it and then sometimes we know, yeah, this is a gem or no, we know there’s something here, but it is still rough. Do you have the time? Are you willing to invest the resources? Let us sit down together and polish this until it shines.

So, we solicit manuscripts a lot and then we also have a sort of cooperative publishing that we do where sometimes we are not responsible for the full cost of the publication; where the author also brings something to the table and we bring in our expertise, we bring in our years of professionalism and we sit down with the work and help shape it into a beautiful piece that can earn its place in the world.

We have a call for submissions, we solicit manuscripts directly and then we also have authors come to us because the reputation precedes us and when they say, Oh, I saw something that you did for A, B, C. I saw it in this country, I saw it in that state, in that city. I think I would like to work with you. So that happens as well.

You mentioned that you solicit manuscripts, especially from emerging authors. What’s the reception like? Have they been able to prove the trust you reposed in them?

The response has been very encouraging. I think the challenge, like I said, is about the limited resources that we have. There’s so much more than we can take. So, even when we solicit, even when we do a call for submissions, for example, we get more manuscripts than we can take on. And some of them we say, okay, if you are willing to wait one, two, three years, we might be able to take it on at some point. But some of them don’t have the time, some of them don’t have the patience, some of them also have other choices that they are willing to consider, and why not if not. Even if we have the deepest pockets in the industry, we still would not be able to publish every good work that we come across. We have to pick and choose.

So, the response has been encouraging. I only wish that we had the resources to be able to take on more work and more risks in this business because you have to pre-plan and sort of restrict yourself to a list of titles that you release every year. That’s how you do planning in a business such as ours. You have to, at the beginning of the year, predict how many books you plan on releasing that year because you have to allocate funds for them and put in a mechanism that allows the works to be distributed, be submitted as and when due, so that you can also get some returns that will keep your business going.

It’s mixed feelings. Like I explained earlier, there are those books that you had high hopes for; some of them went on to meet your expectations. There are those ones you said, oh, let’s just include this in the mix and sometimes they do exceptionally well. So, it’s a mix – expectations met and sometimes expectations unmet – but it is a mix of good and not-so-good. You take each one in your stride and then you move on to the next one.

Having worked with emerging authors, what would you say is their disposition towards publishing? What lessons would you advise them to learn based on your interaction with them?

I think patience. Yes, I understand that as creatives, after creating in isolation for a while, you begin to yearn for an audience. I always tell people that the internet is your friend. Creatives, oftentimes, want to hold onto their works; they have that feeling of uncertainty, self-doubt, and I think sometimes, insecurity too. Some of them are also afraid that if the work goes out into the world, it might be stolen; some other person might claim it as theirs, and all of that. But there is nothing as good as being able to put a due date for the release of any work out. So, test the waters first.

Let me talk about a poet, for example. You write poems or stories every now and then. These stories will just stay in your notebook, on your phone, on your laptop, or whatever device you write with and gather dust. You, at some point, have to first of all socialise with communities of creatives because they’ve become your first respondents. You’d cultivate friendships and relationships with some of them and you’d come to earn each other’s trust. And some of them, their opinions and judgements you’d come to hold dear because you have also encountered their works; you have interacted with the person, so you know the character behind the works as well. So when you come up with your own work, you share some of those initial drafts with them for feedback. They tell you ‘Oh, this is good. Ah, this? Nah.’ Sometimes they give you feedback and suggestions for improvement. Take those suggestions and feedback to your work desk. You consider those ones that you feel are necessary to the development and the refinement of the work and you implement them.

The goal is for the work or piece you are working on to become better and for you to become a better writer. That feedback and that community of first readers help shape you, help you to move from being a talented writer to a skilled writer, and these are different things. You have to go through a sort of mentorship or apprenticeship system or model for you to get better at this. You could do that by reading books by other writers. You could do that by attending events, workshops, and seminars where these things are taught. You could also do that by socialising with the right community of creatives; people who know better than you. If you have read 20 books, there are people who have read 40, there are people who have read 100 and that wealth of experience and knowledge they have acquired through the years, if you have a relationship with them, there is a way that the benefits of it can impact your own development as a creative. All of these take patience. All of these require time. All of these require grit and constant grinding at it. If you are not willing to put in the work, ultimately, it’s going to show in the output that you give.

I also think nothing ventured, nothing gained. You have to look for the right platforms and publications where you can test the validity of your talent, the validity of your creativity; whether they are journals, magazines, blogs, events, competitions, whichever ones interest you, where you can submit or enter some of these things you are creating. Yes, you will get a lot of rejections; that’s a part of the trade. Sometimes you get 10, 20, or even more rejections and then you get 1, 2, 3 acceptances, but you don’t talk about those rejections; you take them, you swallow them. Some of them hurt you deeply, especially if it is a platform that you have so much enjoyed and you’ve been looking forward to. And you feel ‘This is going to be one of the biggest validations that I need at this point if so, so, so platform accepts one of my works.’ And then you send that work. Maybe you wait for months before you finally hear from them and then they send you a rejection. Or sometimes they don’t even respond to you at all and these things happen. Do you feel pained? Yes! Should you feel pained? Yes! Should you feel bitter? Yes, you can and should. But should you stop writing? Should you stop pushing? Should you stop developing? No! You have to keep doing it because that is how you get better at these things. And then you will be surprised that those platforms that said no to you in the past, one day you’d come up with something new, or you might even dig up something old and look at it with new or fresh eyes, revamp it, then send it, and they might accept it. But then again, they might not accept it all through your career because every platform has its own agenda, has its own ideals, has its own vision, has its own goals.

So, sometimes rejection is not a commentary on the good or otherwise, and on the quality of your writing. It could just be that it is not considered suitable for what that platform is set up to do or achieve at that point in time. So, I think that people need to know that you need a lot of grit, you need a lot of experimentation, you need a lot of trials and errors, and you need a lot of patience in order to become a successful creative. And you have to have to be able to let go of these children that you’ve given birth to so that they can grow on their own and earn a name and place for themselves in the world.

How do you think creatives can go about writer’s block and imposter syndrome so they don’t lose themselves or feel they don’t have creative skills during the period of waiting for validation?

I think self-doubt is a fundamental part of being a creative. But I think you should do what gives you joy because first, if you find joy and happiness in doing that thing, yes, you want validation, yes you look for validation, but with or without it, there is that feeling of joy and contentment, of happiness, of usefulness that you get from doing that thing. Validation, when it does come, is a plus if you have that disposition to creativity.

Sometimes I remember Faze, who used to be part of the Plantashun Boiz, when he was going to release the song ‘Kolomental.’ I can’t remember which radio station the song premiered on, but I was listening to the radio on that particular day. And the host of the show was asking him questions about the song. He was quite apologetic; he was appealing to people to say, ‘Look, yeah, this is not my usual style. This is not the kind of song you’d expect from somebody like me, but you know I am trying to evolve, I am trying to experiment.’ He was quite apologetic because I guess he wasn’t sure of how the song would be received, because that was different from everything he had done up to that moment. And I remember listening to him and wondering why is this one begging us for forgiveness as if he has offended us by singing and releasing a song? Then they played that song and I was like ‘What is this?’ I was taken aback and asked, ‘Why is this man singing this?’ But then, a few weeks after the release of that song, it became the rave of the moment. It became one of the biggest songs of that era. In hindsight, when I remember that moment of listening to Faze on the radio, I say, ‘Yeah, this is an essential part of every creative’s journey.’ Of course, he was open enough to making himself vulnerable to the public, to the audience, listeners and consumers of his music and I think that that was something that was uncommon in that era. But it is also something that I see in a lot of creatives. There are those things that you are sure of, that you can swear by. And there are those things that you are not quite sure of, that are neither here nor there, but which somebody in the business side of things should be willing to say, ‘This is it. Let’s take a bet on this and see where it goes.’

Self-doubt is an essential tool of the trade. I don’t think being a creative puts you in a position where you can be sure all the time. For example, when I write poetry, there are poems that I’ve written and I will be like ‘Wow! Na me write this thing?’ It looks profound, beautiful. Then I leave it; walk away for some days, weeks, months, and I come back to read it again and I am like ‘What rubbish is this? How did I write this nonsense? What was going through my mind at the point when I was creating this?’ I ask myself all of these questions. Then I look at it. Maybe because I am coming back to it with fresh eyes and sometimes at a glance I see all the things I did wrong. But the process of time, that maturation process, allows me to come back and see it with fresh eyes and work hard at improving it.

So, as a creative, you have to be able to ask yourself questions. You have to be your own biggest critic. But again, you also have to know, like they say, that no great work is actually ever finished. You have to get to that point where your attachment to the work doesn’t become OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. You have to come to that point where, regardless of how good or bad the work is, or what ideas you had in mind while creating the work, you have to get to that point where you say, ‘I have given my best to this work’ and let it go. And sometimes you need people around you – a community of creatives, your immediate reading circle – who can look at it and say ‘Yeah, give us this work’ because sometimes you are looking at what you have created through a particular lens. But when your first respondents come across it, they provide other perspectives, which hitherto might not have occurred to you. And when you listen to all of these, that feedback helps you; that feedback reassures you.

For example, when I was working on my second collection of poems, I was trying to write about six different collections. Almost every section in that collection was supposed to be a book on its own. But I struggled with it for like six years; I couldn’t finish any of them. In the midst of that, my house was burgled and the computer and hard drives on which all the manuscripts were, were carted away by the burglars and some of them I had to go back to. I had bits and pieces here and there. Some of them I had mailed to my friends in one version or the other. So, I was able to go back and somehow began to work on them again. After a while, I wasn’t making progress on any of the six books or thereabouts; I write this for a time and leave it. For years, it seemed like I was not making progress. I then explained to some of my friends. I said, ‘Look, this is what I have been working on.’ Some of them said, ‘Okay, let’s begin to look at it. Look at this. Look at that.’ They helped me see things that I wasn’t seeing before. What I thought were supposed to be separate books, they helped me see that common trend that ran through them and they said, ‘Oh, you can bring this together. You can rearrange it this way and maybe you could have a collection.’ I began to consider that. Of course, it still took months, well over a year of me trying to look at all those things and piece them together. And I left out quite a lot because you have to bring discipline to the book.

But without their help and assistance, it would have been difficult to come up with that book. But I trusted their judgement because they were not just my friends, they were people who I knew knew what a good poem is; they know what good writing is and I had the good fortune of being their friend. The same way they offer me their care and guidance is the same way I offer it to them and offer it to others; iron sharpens iron. And that’s how that book came about and that’s the journey of that book. Some of those leftovers from that book now are growing and developing a life of their own and some of them will still evolve later on.

That is the beauty of having a community that you can share with. Because the creative journey is a lonely journey, you should have a community that gives you that refreshment that you need from time to time. You need your own tribe who understands you, who understands what it is you are trying to do, even when they don’t understand sometimes. At least, they will not throw you away; they will not abandon you. They will hold your hand while you walk through that darkness until you get to the light.

So, every creative needs that because you would be disillusioned. You would be stuck at the things you are creating from time to time. You would need a bit of fresh air. You may need to walk. You may need to take long walks in the mornings or in the evenings. You may need to travel. You may need to read new stuff or have your friends and community introduce you to new writers or new artistes. You may have to watch documentaries, do research and all of these. You may have to go talk to people who may have similar or actual experiences that you are trying to recreate in the work.

It takes a village to raise a writer, to raise a creative. The more and earlier you realise that it takes a village, the easier the journey becomes for you. The tendency is always that because it is a lonely journey, you want to walk the path alone and when you walk it alone, you are going to suffer a lot of depression, frustration, writer’s block, creative block and all of those. But that community will help you stay alive, stay on the path of creativity, open your eyes and guide you towards the opportunities that exist in that sector.

Literary Odyssey: Top 20 books by Nigerian authors in 2024

Meanwhile, TheRadar earlier reported Nigerian authors delivered diverse and impactful stories that captivated both local and global audiences in 2024.

TheRadar compiled a list of 20 books to reflect on the outstanding literary contribution of Nigerian authors.