The Editor: Story Killer v Story Teller

by Mazuba Mwiinga

As a cub reporter we called that guy; it often times was a guy – the ‘spiker’. With his sharpened pencil he crossed out sentences and circled others before he drew arrows where that paragraph was supposed to be. He rewrote some of our beautifully expressed sentences that took us the whole night figuring out how to present the true nature of what we witnessed in the field, while he sat at his desk romanticising his mind with politics of the day.

He notoriously shelved off our stories for one reason only – he was the editor; the supreme news leader of news writing – how cross! When the story came out front page the following day, you could hardly recognise it. Several times I complained how my stories never got published because I never read our paper, but just used to glance at the headlines, without realising that they were actually front page stories. I couldn’t recognise my style neither was the substance of my stories. The editor breathed the devil’s life in them and shamelessly put my by-line there. How callous!!

Where I smiled in the story, he cried. Where I called, he shouted. Where I told the facts, he narrated the events. Where I described the situation, he generalised the form. He was the editor. He owned our eyes, our thoughts and our ears. He was the guru; the overseer, who knew how the truth was to be presented.

File it. Those were news and feature stories. We were able to laugh the rough out of our rug. Who cared when lies were told out of the truth? It was the newspaper business; ‘publish it and let the reader be damned’. Remember that phrase?

Then came creative fiction writing; and the hand that knew better how to think better than the owner of the thoughts, said ‘this is not how we write this’. The game changed. Dude, this is creation. I sit, and see an invisible world to the naked eye. Only I see it; not with my naked eyes, but with my mind eye. For you to see what I see, you need to be in my mind.  How then do you know what I see and hear, and how the sentences in my inner mind eye see and hear? You haven’t seen my people in my mind, neither have you heard them speak; how then do you know that their sentence construction is wrong? Or that, that word is wrongly said?

Don’t you know that, what is written from the mind is life on paper? It’s presented in its originally created form the way it is supposed to be? I am just a medium who reveals that which exists in the possibilities you have never known before. How then do you say this paragraph does not make sense here? Ask those I see in that invisible realm. I am just the creator who brings forth to life that which you have never seen or heard before.

I know why you try to get into my creation. You call it fiction, thinking that it’s a door mat under which any one can step on because it doesn’t exist – its fiction. Wrong. Thinking that way, would also qualify that you too as a person, are fictitious. Your creator brought you out of the unknown to the known. Therefore possibly you don’t exist too. You could be an illusion of someone’s mind. Not so? Fair enough?

The good news is this – Fiction is sacred. Fiction is sanctified. It is holy. Every word a character says, every word the narrator speaks, is the way it is supposed to be spoken. That’s the world of that particular creation. That’s the realm of the existence of that life. Touching it to skew this creation towards your understanding of your own world is tantamount to treason of this particular world for you are trying to sabotage the existence of the life you are not familiar with. Literal fiction is life as you know it in your own personal experience. Do you know the book that came to be known as the first African novel, titled; ‘The Palm wine Drinkered’? Yes, drinkered…very correct, because that was the nature of that world. What of the famous ‘Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born?’ Correct too…’beautyful’…that’s another world.

When writers write – They see. They hear. They smell. They touch; all through their mind eye. Isn’t that something to be sacred about? Who has seen a mind? Or touched a thought? Yet they reveal phenomenal worlds never heard of before. Isn’t that something to respect about, when we see these worlds on paper? Yes you see them on paper every time you look at those pages you consider incoherent. You aren’t reading the sentences; it’s your mind eye interpreting what the creator saw. If you can’t understand it, don’t label the creator as wrong or poor writer. The problem is in you. Your mind eye can’t decode the dimension of that world.