We’ve never met. This might not even be one of your many names, but I know you’re out there, several people scattered across the world, storytellers who are starting out. In this letter, I think I’m teaching, sharing, because there is no unfolding of a self without the space to do it in, without the safety that my career as a writer has given me. I don’t teach a lot of things, but I can try with this: the spell that I used to carry me from being a baby writer walking blind in faith and terror to where I am now, where I am sure and certain and strong in my work. This I know, as intimately as the wet side of my skin if it was taken off the muscle and held up, flapping like a sail looking for direction. The teaching helps me remember, helps me loop back into myself. Just remember that anyone can tell you their spells, but like most lessons, I don’t know if it will help.
So. There are these questions about how the magic moves. Is it the rites you perform, the resources you use, or does it come from something deeper inside a person? Does the spell work for people who aren’t me? I hope it does. I share it often and openly because I want it to work for others; I want it to do for them what it did for me. I think it could make so many of us safe. The magician tells me that other people can’t do what I do, and maybe I believe him a little, but that’s not the point. People can do such spectacular things if you forget to tell them it’s impossible. I want them to try.
This is a spell for storytellers—for those of us who make books or are trying to. We want the work to sustain itself, we want it to feed us and keep us safe, but sometimes it feels like we’re missing a map. How can we get to where we want to be? What is the hack, the strategy to make it happen? What words do you chant into the space between spaces, to bend your desires into reality?
Here’s what I did. I hope it helps.
When I started the spell, I thought about the things I wanted. After I wrote Freshwater, I wanted a book deal, I wanted to be able to write full time, and I wanted a Nigerian visual artist to design the book’s cover. A year or two later, I wanted a bungalow, a personal hairstylist, and money. I wanted to be able to afford to keep making my work. I wanted to wear my pink faux fur to my book launch, and I wanted to stunt at awards. Right now, I want a television show and I want to be entirely out of debt. As I write this, it’s the fall of 2019 and I’m lying in bed in my bungalow, planning outfits for a gala where my second book is being honored. I’ve been writing full time since 2014.
This is how I know that it doesn’t matter if you think the goals are attainable. They are. What matters is that they are impossible without the work, they cannot happen if you don’t make the work. With my spell, I drew a map of the future I wanted, then I took those defined lines and pulled them across time, dragging them into the present. Time bends very easily; you can fold it like this with little trouble. So. The spell is to make that future real, which can be done because you are not powerless, and the only thing that needs to be done in the here and now is to make the work. Or, to put it simply, all you have to do is write.
The future fans out in brilliance, powered by imagination and ego and hope and a thousand other things, but all that glory can be condensed across time into the choice to sit and write words down. It doesn’t even have to be done well—that’s what revision is for. It just has to be completed. There is such a space, a stretch of desert, between imagining something, writing it, and then finishing it. Execution is a particular discipline, something built out of corded rigor, tight and greased with sacrificial blood. There are many components to this spell: how to make the task at hand the only one that is real; how to work when you don’t want to; how to summon your want and collar it for your purposes, setting it to work.
I bribed myself with the future. I dangled the things I wanted in front of my greedy eyes, and in the flush of that desire I reminded myself that writing five hundred words right now would reel in the world I wanted. There is always something you can do right now; there is always a first step, no matter how small it is. Seeds are often tiny, and it means nothing about what they will grow up to be. You plant them anyway, and that’s what making the work is.
I don’t think everyone believes that it can be that simple, but again, I’m not sure how making and fulfilling your own prophecies works for other people.
If you say yes with enough force, your chi will say yes, too. My chi and I are hurtling forward at breakneck speed—faster than my body can handle; my flesh breaks down at this pace. I believed in the spell with everything I had, and maybe that is the generator powering it all—that utter belief. Not on its own, but the actions that are fueled by it.
I wrote The Death of Vivek Oji while Freshwater was on submission to publishers. In the fall before Freshwater came out, I wrote Pet. All you have to do is write. By the time Pet came out, I had completed Little Rot. It doesn’t get easier with each one, but after the first execution, you know that the rest are possible, and with possibility you can do almost anything. You refine your spells, adjusting a touch here, a sacrifice there, but the work is a spell on its own; it does its own magic once executed.
I’ve watched people try to find shortcuts, hacks that avoid the work, and they end up wasting so much energy that could’ve been put into the work. For storytellers like us, it’s hard learning how to give the work the devotion it requires, how to let the rest of the world burn, how to abandon control. It’s a little like madness—and people will foam at the mouth to tell you so, as if you don’t already know, as if you’re not screaming inside from the fear. I don’t know what to say to that. I suppose you have to be willing to go mad. Can you lose control of something you never really controlled in the first place? Illusions are the best things to burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who start them even worse.
Maybe this spell is specifically for people who talk to God. I’m sure it can be adapted for others, but its foundation in God is my only point of certainty. I have no reason to believe what I believe without the flame of faith. I knew what my futures would be because they were shown to me—I don’t consider myself a prophet. Obey, I was told, and receive all you desire. Again, it seems simple, but none of it is. Execution isn’t, and neither is obedience; both are rife with costs, both are stained with ash from the burned offering. You get nothing for free; you pay for all of it. God asks for so much. How much will you give? Your loved ones, your reality, your friends, your pleasures, your time, your security, your sanity, your fear, your control, your illusions? How much will you get?
Some people can’t finish the spell because they balk at the costs. That makes sense; who wouldn’t? If it wasn’t hard to sacrifice, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. This doesn’t work like a crossroads deal. When I talk about the journey with my friends, we call it the desert: the place between where you came from and where you are trying to go, the hard place, a sky that drives you mad and nothing on the horizon. There is no map. There is no food and there is no water. There is manna that goes stale, there is temptation; there is God; there is a requirement for patience beyond what you thought possible, for trust beyond what seems sane; there is an end, but you cannot see it. I don’t blame people for not completing the spell. It’s a bloody road to stick to, simple as it is. It asks for the world and gives you silence, but part of the rigor is staying, showing up for the work regardless of the conditions. This is ritual, religion, sacrifice, magic—this is the spell.
The first time is the hardest.
It worked for me, that’s all I can say. I don’t know what other factors were at play, but it worked, so I stay faithful. My instructions shift, and my sacrifices do, too. I have received gifts beyond what I could have imagined for myself, and been torn apart to degrees I never thought I could survive. I think that is balance. I am also stronger than I ever thought—a beast, a god—my life is unrecognizable, and on the better days I delight in it.
I still use the spell; it is a reliable one and I want so much; I am greedy for things I never dared to want before. The spell is clear: face your work. I inhale it like a meditation sometimes, to counter the panic of a life mutating too fast, when I wake up every day as a different person inside a different world. Everything else can shift however it wants, but the work will always be the work. No matter what changes, that instruction is still the same.
What happens after you make the work might be uncertain, but one thing is guaranteed: If you don’t make the work, nothing will happen. Discipline is just a series of choices. With the spell, we can understand that each choice is carving out a future, finding our way out of the desert. Trust me, it’s glorious on the other side.