Yewande Omotoso: On Writing Bom Boy

Yewande Omotoso was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria with her Barbadian mother, Nigerian father and two older brothers. The family moved to South Africa in 1992. Omotoso studied Architecture at the University of Cape Town, worked as an architect for several years and went on to complete a Masters degree in Creative Writing. Bom Boy is Omotoso’s debut novel and was published in South Africa by Modjaji Books. She is currently working on her second novel. Yewande lives in Johannesburg. In this piece, she writes about her experience working on her first novel Bom Boy.

I made the conscious decision, in the year 2008, to apply for a Masters in Creative Writing. I’d heard a lot about the MA programme at the University of Cape Town. When I applied, I’d been writing something, mostly aimless and rambling. What I would later learn is that I tend to do a lot of aimless rambling writing. One of the things I hope I learnt at UCT is to have the courage--or madness--to do two things.

First, to keep bumping around in the proverbial literary darkness and when I stumble on something solid and true to recognise it and pick it up. Second, to admit that I’ve rambled and rambled and gone around in circles, admit that “there’s nothing here”, put away the pen or the laptop, stash the already written pages somewhere and move on. 

Those initial ramblings, over the course of my masters degree, would get edited, massaged, re-written and re-written and would, sometime at the far end, turn into Bom Boy. 

So Bom Boy got mined from these rambling thoughts. About social isolation, being on the outside, about wanting people (friends) but not knowing how to get them. About being foreign. My character morphed. I started out thinking I’d write about someone so sick he kills people and feels nothing about it. It didn’t work and eventually Leke developed into a strange, even scary, person, but not a killer. In the early days of the manuscript, he captures someone who becomes a big part of the story – that didn’t make it. In the early early days both Oscar and Leke were the same character. Until one day, only with the astute feedback from a classmate, I realised the person I was writing as one character was actually a father and a son. I split the atom.

My experience of writing was very humbling. I had to learn--I don’t think you ever stop--how to hear what is working in the story and what is not. And, while I had ideas about what kind of story I wanted to tell, I had to accept when I was wrong and be willing to change.

I wrote the first ending of the book and my supervisor told me everything didn’t have to tie together so neatly. I agreed with her so I wrote an ending that both she and I liked, that ending made it to the published version of the book. But now several people who read Bomboy tell me that the ending is too abrupt, what happened to Leke afterwards, what happened?  

In writing Bom Boy I learnt to be headstrong, to keep putting words on a page even when they were not good or just plain bad. I learnt to keep moving along. You’ll edit later. I learnt to not pay too much attention to the voice that reminds me how useless I am at writing stories, how no one cares and no one’s going to bother. For Bomboy I was working fulltime as an architect so I would write in the very early hours of the morning, each day before work. When I was desperate I would write during my lunch-breaks. As always I read copiously. Being in the masters programme--there were about ten or fifteen of us:  English language graduates, professional script writers, writers, journalists, jewellery artists and so on--made for an exciting time and I have fond memories of my experience. I also made some new friends. 

My supervisor was invaluable to me while I was writing Bomboy but so too was Kira, another masters student in my class. Kira and I struck up a partnership, agreeing to read and comment on each other’s work weekly. Another pair of eyes is something that makes a difference for me in my writing process. It’s icky and difficult because I only want to hear the good stuff. But you have to be willing to hear the bad stuff in order to at least make an attempt at turning it into good. Receiving honest feedback is not my strong point (I’m not the most gracious) but it is an anchor.

After almost two years, in October of the year 2010, I finished the manuscript and handed it in to the university. I also submitted it to a potential publisher before UCT even had a chance to mark it. I was impatient. I know a lot of writers who hold back their work, polishing it, making it better and better. I admire this and I also do it. However in addition to being a perfectionist I have a perfectionist-overflow valve that goes “look, it’s not perfect--it probably would never be--but you’ve worked and worked and worked on it. It’s okay for some things to end. When you start your next project you will build on this and get better.”

So I completed Bom Boy. I had told a story. I didn’t think it was perfect, but it was as close as I could get to perfection at the time. And part of the job, it seems, is to keep jumping for that.