By Nathaniel Bivan
A decade ago, sometime around 2011, I decisively started writing short stories (I had been writing poetry and working on a novella long before then) on a Facebook group called Creative Writers World (CWW). The platform helped to connect me to writers across Nigeria such as Samuel Okopi, Lengshak TooBlack Gomwalk, Bizuum Yadok, among others. The space was so active that some of us were literarily afraid to post because critics tore at your work once it hit the platform. The experience was one of a kind–it meant instant and undiluted feedback because these were mostly people who didn’t know you facially and so weren’t wary of speaking their minds.
Years later, while on Daily Trust’s arts desk, I started a blog where I wrote short stories. Then I began to shop them to online literary magazines with the defunct The Flash Fiction Press being one of the most prominent among those who accepted my work.
What am I driving at?
Short stories are an excellent way to hone your writing craft. Reading and writing them is a powerful education for any writer looking to run the novel writing marathon. A short story has a way of teaching you how to use plot, characterisation, setting, apply POV and everything else that a novel needs in five-thousand words or less.
Some writers today don’t want to take that route. They avoid it like the plague in a rush to self-publish e-novels on Amazon or Selar. A writer I respect so much is the owner of a popular online blog called Journal of a Jesus Girl. She is a prolific writer who churns out short stories as fast as a ‘submachine gun’ on her page, almost on a daily basis. And what’s more, unlike others written on social media that lack the short story ingredient, hers almost always does. Sometimes, she packages her work on selar at a price or lets readers have access for free.
What do you think such a writer achieves?
Overtime, once you’re growing in writing short fiction, building a novel becomes easier because you have developed your writing muscles like a runner who starts sprinting a hundred and two hundred metres before daring to run a marathon.
My message is simple:
Back in the day, I didn’t get many short stories published on literary magazines, but I wrote nevertheless. On Facebook. On my blog. I even wrote an entire collection in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, that I have never shared with the world. All these helped in building my writing muscles, and I haven’t stopped. The point of writing sprints is not always for the sole purpose of getting published or for an audience, be it on or off social media. In fact, this could also apply to marathons (i have written and dumped an entire novel manuscript). There’s a phase of writing that’s aimed at grooming oneself for a much bigger task or excellent work. It is done secretly and remains private, yet its manifestation becomes public when the time is right and the writer and his work are ripe.
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Nathaniel Bivan is the author of Boys, Girls and Beasts, a debut novel published in 2024 by Masobe Books. He has published several other books, including a memoir, a children’s storybook, and a chapbook titled 20 Love Letters to the Christian Fiction Writer. Bivan is also an independent solutions and conflict journalist who mostly contributes to The Christian Science Monitor.
