Three Things I’ve Learned While Writing My First Novel on Black Personhood
On clarifying the one thing you write about, the perils of planning, and my lovely new Macbook Air.
Since I announced that I would be working on a novel, I left a toxic job, started a gig that seems like a dream one, had my son turn three, survived my first month-long bout against COVID-19 (the ghetto, y’all), drank many bottles of Uncle Nearest, and smoked many cigars in the name of rest and ancestor worship.
The progress is slow, but “Rei’s Reign” moves forward.
This is the first piece of extended fiction that I’ve worked on daily. It is a different species of putting letters and words together to make beauty and meaning that has been my grits and butter for the last decade — short-form essays and long-form creative non-fiction. The real world informs my fiction. Non-fiction is so much easier. Pulling forth the echo that the real world dings against the soul is much more challenging. Over months of writing, three characters have taken form. Rei. Nkosi. Stray. Hip-hop Is the beat, but their tragic relationship is Rakim spitting his knowledge on what it took to create two different types of men.
I’ve learned three things so far in my early journey into extended fiction:
