“Whenever I reach a standstill, I find that I’ve detached from a text. I also find that the experience of being stalled isn’t something I receive as negative; it can be a defense against falsehood,
in my experience, and against producing material that’s serviceable, but lifeless in the end. I’m of the position that most of my work deals with extremes, at the moment, and whether this is by choice or not, I can’t tell, but I’ve come to accept that I can’t write until I reacquaint myself with the emotional and psychological core of what I’m working on, which is often easier to avoid than to do. However, the act of creating anything with an amount of proficiency is exhilarating, and I usually start by reading the text back from the beginning, and interrogating why I took on the project to begin with. I mine whatever intellectual, emotional, or physical experience that might have inspired it, and then I remind myself of the reward of working through that with fiction. Sometimes, when that well is dry, too, I set out into the world to discover it again from living.”
—Masande Ntshanga, author of The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio, 2016)
Photo credit: Giorgia Fanelli