WELL-READ BLACK GIRL

Award-winning Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor was in Cape Town recently for the Open Book Festival, and chatted to filmmaker Wayne Thornley about writing in collaboration, the differences between writing for film and writing a novel, and her upcoming feature animation, Camel Racer.

Okorafor won the movie deal, along with her collaborator, Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu, in a competition held by Triggerfish Animation Studios, established with the support of the Department of Trade and Industry and the Walt Disney Company.

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But it didn’t come Who Fears Death didn’t come into the world without a fight.

“Who Fears Death started off at over 700 pages, a Book 1 and a Book 2, and I showed it to my agent and he was like, oh this is wonderful, it’s going to win all these awards, but you need to shrink it down a lot, because this is African science fiction and it’s new, and nobody does Book 1 and 2 – what is that, a duology?

So he said, keep the same plot, keep the same everything, but get it down from over 700 pages to 300. And I did it! It took me two years, but I did it.”

Okorafor said she used a method taught to her by her agent, who also happens to write books on writing.

“I took the manuscript and looked at every single word and took out every single word that didn’t need to be there,” she said. “And then I combined the ‘weak phrases’ into ‘strong words’, so instead of saying ‘very big’, you say ‘huge’.

So I took the 700 pages, scattered them around, mixed them all up, and then took each page out of context and went through the whole thing. It took years, but I got it down to 389 pages, and that became Who Fears Death. Even though it had the same story, it was a completely different book.”

Okorafor added that the process of making Camel Racer is very different – starting with her collaboration with Kahiu.

“With Wanuri and I, we first sit down and talk extensively about the idea and have long, long conversations. And then one of us will say, okay I’m going to write this thing, whether it’s a treatment or a piece of script, or whatever. And they write a first draft. And once that’s done and nice and typo free, they hand it over to the other person, who then has complete, open, full rein to do whatever they want with it. Then they hand it back, and we go back and forth like that. The end product is so hybrid we can’t tell which thing she wrote and which thing I wrote. It’s one thing. And it’s something that I would never have written by myself.”

Next Week at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe! 

Wednesday, July 27, 7PM, Nicole Dennis-Benn and Tiphanie Yanique In Conversation 

A reading and conversation with Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes The Sun, and Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning, How to Escape From A Leper Colony, and Wife. Moderated by Glory Edim,founder of Well-Read Black Girl.

Thursday, July 28, 7 PM, The Moth Community Showcase, $10

Join us for a celebration of The Moth Community Program, including some of our favorite stories from this season’s workshops. $10 tickets are available 3 weeks before the show at this link.

$1 LP Sale, July 29 - July 31

Music-lovers! We’re pulling out a special selection of LPs that we’re selling for just $1. Beef up your collection, and see what gems you can find!

Store Hours Next Week:

Bottom image by Emily Bogle/NPR

Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing traces the awful impact of slavery on generations of a Ghanaian family – one branch sold into bondage in America, and one that remained in Ghana. Gyasi was born in Ghana, but grew up in Huntsville, Ala. – she tells NPR’s Scott Simon, “Had I not grown up in Alabama, I don’t know that I would have ever written this book.”

Find their conversation here.