Tolu Fapohunda's Blog

Ignore the odd photograph but you don’t have to know every single literary term in order to be considered a writer. In fact, most people are writers before they discover the detailed nuances of writing and even publishing a book. It is important, however, to employ some of these devices in your writing! Without further ado, let's get started!  Imagery (This is my favorite) – This is the use of visually descriptive or figurative language in writing. One way to describe this is 'showing' versus telling. Below, is an example. Notice how very flat and uninspired the first example is. Don't you just prefer the second option? Personification – This is when you give human characteristics to non-human objects or elements. Examples are:  The party died down. The city never sleeps. The wind howled. The iron gates looked down at them cruelly. Point of view – How your story is told and through whose perspective is what your point of view is. This could be fi...

Probably my favorite technique of any good story is the dialogue. This is because dialogue is the soul of a story. It is  a very useful tool that gives voice to the characters and is an important element in their development. Simply put, the verisimilitude of a work of fiction is mostly dependent on the dialogue. Unfortunately for many writers, dialogue is one of, if not the hardest part, of writing a book. This is not hard to figure out because as a writer, you must keep track of the many different voices of your characters and ensure that what they utter rings true. Otherwise, you have written bad dialogue. Gone are the days of writing large narrative chunks which defined the past literary era- I'm talking the likes of Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. In their days, it was very fashionable to write in long passages full of rhetorics and numbing descriptives. Don't get me wrong, you must still write those-somewhat- but today's reader has neither the patience nor t...

People have asked me why I wrote (and likely will always write) a mystery novel. My answer to them is the same. Why not write a mystery novel? There is a degree of snobbery that comes with crime/mystery fiction writing, some of which are justified as some of them might seem overly prosaic and but what if the mystery /crime fiction is just as literary as a contemporary classic? Most critics then go quiet. Bits of Other People by Tolu Fapohunda 🌀 What they fail to understand is that all forms of writing is an insight into our own experiences, fears and anxieties, because as we write, we are putting out there, a part of ourselves. It largely depends, as the author, how you write it. In my debut novel, Bits of Other People, a mystery, I explored everyday Nigeria in story and ask you to come along on the ride to engage your cerebrum to solving a mystery stemming from a man’s affection for another woman. I touched on subjects ranging from psychology to youth angst about lack of...