“Write as though nobody is watching…” These words from Dan Brown struck me as I scrolled through Instagram. You see for a few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what my first post of the year should be. I’ve written so many articles but nothing seemed good enough to herald in all the great stuff I’ll be sharing this year. Suddenly a video of Dan Brown popped up on my feed as a sponsored ad and those words were the first things I heard. It hit me just then what my first post will be.

If you’ve been an ardent reader of this blog, you’ll notice I hadn’t posted in over four months. The reason is quite simple; whatever story I wrote in those few months felt like they were not big enough. Not good enough. I’d write and when I finished, it’d feel to me like it wasn’t there yet and I’d put it down.

You see I’ve always known what stories I wanted to tell. They are simple, everyday stories – stories of that Mallam on your street, that neighbour with a pretty wife, that beggar wiping down your windshield in traffic, of days when you had the most ridiculous ideas or the most insane experiences or that business meeting that left you dazed. Or even stories of and from the advertising world in Nigeria. All I’m saying is that I’ve always wanted to write stories of you. But the Hows can be quite tough especially when you realize that there are no new ideas or stories. Only new Hows. So I look at each story and ask myself how do I want to tell it? How do I introduce the characters? How should I expose the idea? How do I resolve conflict? How do I end it? Do I want to play up a character or revolve it around a setting, make it about a structure, around a narrative technique or combination of several techniques? Will I simply use an incredibly annoying language as a tool? These questions can be intimidating especially when you have a story that tends to run by itself.

I don’t have the answers to these questions but with every new article or story this year, I hope to give you engaging hows – hows that will turn the simplest stories into masterpieces. Taking the blog a notch higher, I’ll be telling stories of my work journey and life experiences too. So stick with me, I’m ready to share with you what I’ve been doing.

Love, Taiwo

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