When editing, I often find first-time authors become side-tracked from their narrative by the desire to describe everything they can in a scene. While admirable, and sometimes done very well, all that extra information tends to drown the point of the scene and their writing in a wealth of unnecessary detail.
Which is why I am in awe and love with writer, Teju Cole’s 4000 word essay in 250 tweets.
Cole was born in America, but grew up in Nigeria. He is the author of two novels. The first, Every day is for the Thief was published in 2007 and was only available in Nigeria. It’s about a young Nigerian who has returned to Lagos for a short break from New York where he has been studying psychiatry.
His second, but first to be published in the US, is Open City. It follows a Nigerian immigrant, Julius who wanders through Manhattan pondering anything and everything before him, and flies to Europe, Nigeria and back to New York. It’s about the observations of everyday life we tend to be rushing by.
Small fates is a project that started in 2011 while he was working on his third book, Radio Lagos, a non-fiction narrative of Lagos. Small fates is all the material, those quirky bits of historical news that had no place in a book but still resonated with Cole, enough for him to post on Twitter. Cole describes what he was doing as fait divers. It’s an expression used for a newspaper article that is in essence a “compressed report of an unusual happening.” Translated, fait divers means “incidents” or “various things.”
These small bits of news are the news of ordinary people, and Cole’s intention is to show that the normal everyday happenings all around the world, happens in Nigeria too. He’s now working on a similar project for New York, picking these small bits of news from New York papers, a 100 years old.
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/pitch-forward/