CREATIVE SPACE is an award winning column spotlighting Antigua-Barbuda & Caribbean art and culture. It is written by Joanne C. Hillhouse. Read the extended edition with EXTRAS at https://jhohadli.wordpress.com/creative-space. Watch full interviews and extras in the CREATIVE SPACE playlist at https://www.youtube.com/@jhohadli
I’m not here to offer a definitive answer but to map how the latest Wadadli Pen winner, Linita Simon, did it.
She reminds me that she reached out to me to SEEK GUIDANCE re something she had written. “You told me to send you a chapter and you read it (and said) ‘it has good potential.’ That was after the publishing house that I contacted gave me some really bad vibes. So, you actually encouraged me to finish my first novella and that’s why I entered the Wadadli Pen as well. …That was a while back; almost four years.”
We spoke about writers not always having the time for this type of mentorship so it was good that stars aligned that time (but I do encourage people to check out the resources I’ve tried to gather and share at the Wadadli Pen blog – search ‘Resources’). We also spoke about rejections being a normal part of the writing-publishing life even eight books in (Linita: “You’re kidding”), showing up (that’s me taking a dig at Linita for skipping the awards ceremony), and imposter syndrome (the internalised negative self-talk we have to fight while continuing to write, revise, and submit).
Linita, who has been long listed and short listed in the past, remembers her negative reaction to the part of the Wadadli Pen judging cycle that gives writers a chance to edit and re-submit before final judging. “I was told to review and (thought) ‘but my story is fine, nothing is wrong with it’ and I was put off, and I was like ‘you know what, go through it’. When I went through it, I saw grammatical errors and simple things that I had to take out and put in, and I was like ‘okay, sometimes when somebody is giving you advice you have to take it for what it is and not think of it as a criticism’. Because I thought the story was fine.”
It’s very rare that the first draft needs no notes. Which is as it should be, because often that first draft has little to do with contests and publishing; often, we WRITE because … and that because is different for different writers. “I write sometimes to kind of quiet the noise. When I’m stressed and feel a kind of way, writing does that for me.”
Reading was also normalised as a fun diversion in Linita’s childhood. “We used to go to Stermat bookstore. Stermat used to have the books with the cassettes and I think that’s why I like classical music as well, too, because the books had a tape so we would read them and then use the cassette to listen to the different character voices, and they would have the instrumental, classical music during the interludes and so forth.”
Reading is a pipeline to writing, especially with ENCOURAGEMENT. Her stories, serialised in her third form notebook, were must read among her peers: “I’d write a chapter and the girls from fourth and fifth used to come for the book every week and read the chapter.” The secondary school teacher who provided prompts to encourage student writing merits a mention here: “I remember she was one of the first, after my mom, who used to encourage me. She said, ‘you should write, you have something there, write’.”
There’ve been lulls in the writing life of adult Linita, but she found a way to USE THE CONTEST AS MOTIVATION. The entire experience has “really encouraged” her to push on. Linita’s prize package includes a one-on-one session with popular romance and erotica novelist Rilzy Adams. “Out of everything, I’m very excited to meet her. I’m thinking I have to tamper down this excitement so she won’t think I’m crazy when we meet. I’ve read all her books. I’m looking forward to meeting her and I’m looking forward to attending [Dotsie Isaac’s] Senses.”
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