In high school, the often heard expression as we prepared for our general certificate of education examination was that English as a subject did not need any studying. These were people whose primary language of communication was Igbo. In two sessions of non-fiction workshops, I walked out feeling like someone who had approached non-fiction writing with that kind of attitude.

While I was sleeping, nonfiction grew wings and flew away. And there I was still stretching my hands in search of it while it had perched high in the sky.

Creative non-fiction is the term used for non-fiction writing that made the cut. It requires the use of fictional techniques like character development, plot, suspense, dialogue, sensory description, personal reflection and self-exploration. If you are writing literary journalism, it will require the narrative arc. If you are writing memoir, it will require character arc. And if you are writing essay, it will require thematic arc.

The reader wants the writer to bring the story to life. After all, all literature is longing- someone will always want something they cannot have. The events that conspire to get in the way of what they want is the plot.

It is critical to identify where the reader enters your story. That is why it is important to identify the conflict and set it up first. Readers often enter the story at the point where the character is most vulnerable.

Also important to the story is the structure – which means the way you arrange the story for the reader –flashbacks, flashforward, scenes, and other literary techniques.

In writing a memoir, it is important to handle well the double perspective – this stands for what you thought at the time and what you know now.

Metaphor should be used if they serve the story and not the reverse. Too much metaphor is a smoke screen. Metaphors should work on a sensory as well as emotional level.

Writers must be able to identify the scenes that should be well defined. And for the rest, writers should do what Hemingway called “murder your darling.”

Avoid tension that seems artificial.

Whatever you do, remember that the reader must care about your character to invest in him or her. As for the writer, he or she must believe in the story to be able to deliver it.

“In a really great story, the words disappear.”

Writing is hard. It took me six days of intensive workshops and lectures to come to that, often forgotten, conclusion. Those who are lucky to have found a way to write things others can feel, in the writing world, are blessed.

Of course, the first step in all these is to keep writing. After so much debate, internal and external, often intense and retrogressive, I agreed to keep writing in spite of everything. The one and only reason for that is that I identified that I have a story of people who have no voice that only me can tell. I must now work hard and find a way to tell the story so well that you, my reader, will care.