Chapter 125: The Great Leap
Writers have all sorts of relationships with their stories – from the brief and ephemeral to the long and messy. I am not valorizing one over another; heaven knows writers are capable of balancing more than one story at a time, and with it their connections to them. Writing is not a one-approach-suits-all business; one writer’s canvas needn’t be another’s.
But like the desire for a romance that lasts, many writers long for a story that consumes them – keeping them up at night, churning their guts, distracting them to the point of feeling they might go a little mad.
An ambitious narrative. A series. Or facing down the Great White Whale of writing: a book.
I know a lot of writers who write books and have heard from many more who ask whether they should give it a try, too. If you’re asking, I want to tell them, you already know the answer. You don’t seek permission to write a book any more than you need permission to surrender your heart. You just have to.
I am familiar with the seeming lunacy of writing books: I’ve written six and am enmeshed in another. I had assumed I was well past the point of asking myself why I did this. But when I discover that someone new has taken the leap, I like to ask what led them to our odd and perplexing corner of the writing world.
Perhaps, their journey can help other writers. And perhaps it can also help writers like me better understand why we do this to ourselves, again and again and again.
So it was that not long ago I opened The New York Times Book Review to discover a rave for a new book by an old student, Yepoka Yeebo. I hadn’t been in touch with Yeppi for a while and now, out of the blue, I learned the reason for her absence: she’d vanished into Bookland, the parallel universe into which writers venture at their peril and, if they’re good and disciplined and determined, emerge waving a manuscript, exhausted and grinning. Damn, that was tough. But worth it? Yeah. Definitely.
Yeppi’s book, Anansi’s Gold, tells the story of one of the great con men of the ages: John Ackah Blay-Miezah, a Ghanaian rogue who by dint of charm, cunning, and an astounding capacity to spin a fable managed to con millions of dollars out of hundreds of people, many of them so powerful and influential that they were too embarrassed to turn against him.
Blay-Miezah built his con on the tale of the untold millions in gold and cash that Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, confessed on his deathbed that he had hidden away in Swiss bank vaults. The money, set aside for development, was in a trust that could be accessed only by the man who claimed to have been at Nkrumah’s side when he made his startling admission: John Blay-Miezah who, as Yeppi was to learn, was at that moment not in Ghana but in a Pennsylvania prison, doing time for fraud.
I knew Yeppi was well suited for the task of untangling not just the story of Blay-Miezah but all that surrounded it – the proverbial “off-the-clock” of history, politics, finance and international relations that provided the depth and context to bolster the on-the-clock of her story’s narrative spine. In fact it was Yeppi’s story for the Review, The Bridge of Sodom and Gomorrah, that changed how I taught writing by introducing the idea of writers keeping a running account of their reporting through a series of letters.
Yeppi and I had devised a plan in which she sent me periodic updates on what she was learning about life in the vast Ghanian slum that bore that Biblical name. In time she wrote over 60,000 words of letters – equivalent to a 240-page book – from which she extracted a 12,000 word story that is still being read nine years later. By now Yeppi was familiar with the way a story pitched and lurched as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing. But as she was to discover, nothing could really prepare her for the years she would spend finding and telling her story of John Blay-Miezah.
It began, she told me, with a WhatsApp message from her mom, who had come across a story about Blay-Miezah and wondered whether there might be more to it. “This is gonna be a nice 3000-word story, cut and dry. And then I will work on the next thing,” Yeppi told herself. “And then like six years later…”
We sat in a coffee shop and talked for a long time about her story, how she reported it, the twists and turns and thrills of discovery, the frustrations at feeling she could not quite get her arms around it all.
Later, when I listened to the recording of our conversation, and then slowed things down by reading through the transcript I began to appreciate that while our conversation was about journalism, it could just as easily have been about a love story – one with a happy ending that only in retrospect felt inevitable.
I asked her to tell me about the beginning.
“I couldn't stop thinking about it,” she replied,
I asked about the fun.
“The treasure hunt,” she said. “Trying to find that obscure detail, like what the china looked like at a hotel, or who the manager was, or what kind of weaponry was involved? Where did it come from? Or exactly who this particular arms dealer was and if they were still alive, what they were charged with. The tiny, tiny details I couldn't easily find.”
I asked about the hard times.
“It was brutal,” she said of the writing. “It was terrible. It was very, very hard. To actually write. I just wanted to keep on doing the fun stuff and researching and talking to people, too. It was a lot of information to process. And I liked digressions. I was going in 18 different directions, every page. And it was really really hellish to know what to do.”
She went on. “I stressed myself out. I certainly shouldn't have spent so much time behind the desk. But how else do you write? It definitely made me sick to the point that I had to push the due date a couple of times. And there were just days where I was like: I'll never be able to finish this because I'll never answer the same impossible questions about a man whose entire thing was lying and distorting.”
With all love stories there is a moment when you know – when you recognize you’ve come to the point when you want more than anything for things to keeping going.
I asked Yeppi if she had had such a moment with her book. She had, and with all the many stories that come with six years of work – the eternal gratitude to her partner and her friends for helping see her though - this particular moment remained vivid.
She was sitting in the office of a former police officer who had been assigned to supervise Blay-Miezah only to fall under his spell. The police officer became a wealthy man and when Yeppi met him it was in the office of a hotel he owned.
She arrived as the man was writing some emails which gave her the chance to look around his office. There were the usual photographs of his family. But then she noticed tucked on a high shelf was a globe and next to it a photo of John Blay-Miezah who by this point had already died.
“Decades later,” she said, recalling her reaction, “you would have a globe and a portrait of the man in your office, like the rest of the portraits are your actual progeny. This is insane. That he should have all this power. This man could just bend people to his will, which led to him bending histories to his will.”
It was at that moment that Yeppi understood that she had arrived at a crossroads: if she was to continue asking questions about John Blay-Mazieh she would be opening a can of worms.
But as she put it, “I love a good can of worms.”
Sometimes, despite our better judgment, we just can’t help ourselves.
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