Boakye D. Alpha 🤓♊️

Honoured and humbled! 🖤👏🔥

@elnathan_john This. I see lots of myself in this.

As a self taught writer I spent years aggressively studying stories, novels, from contemporary to the classics (I had to catch up on a lot of classics because I did not grow up reading novels or traditional literature.) I have spoken before about my father’s library having many books but most of them religious texts. The only non religious books I remember were Peter Drucker’s book on management. Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters. The Oxford Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Two volumes of Your Health and You. Where There Is No Doctor. I came to prose by chance. A radio presenter in Kaduna, Tony Ibrahim Sagbe, asked me to do something for his Monday morning show. I was still a student (c1999) and told him I only wrote poems. He had read some of them and told me he thought I could write stories. I resisted at first and he promised to read whatever I wrote on the radio on Monday morning. My first ever short story was written for that show. It was a very sad story and when Tony read it people called in and complained that while they liked it, it was too sad for a Monday morning. One person said they cried. So Tony said well we have to do it again. So I wrote more short stories for that show. They were not good stories but they seemed to move people. I had no idea about craft. I was just a depressed teenager writing about how horrible life can get. I kept writing these bad stories and sometime in 2006 I decided to put them together. A year later I self published a book (that still makes me cringe). I moved to Abuja and met real writers who were doing serious work and I still remember a writer attending a reading I had at the Sheraton disagreeing with everyone in the audience who was applauding my stories. She said they were poorly constructed and she didn’t understand why everyone was saying they were good. It was the gut punch that I needed. She asked me what I was reading and shook her head when I mentioned the books. We went to a bookstore and she recommended some books. I began to gather books from everywhere. And I read like my life depended on it. I took apart every sentence, every paragraph, every page. I peeled back the layers of every story I liked. I read like I was stealing. I identified patterns I liked, turns of phrase I liked. I played around with them. I wrote until I could feel something changing. Until I found a voice I was comfortable with. And then I started to experiment. With style. With genre. With craft. I did this for years. And one day I felt comfortable enough to try something long enough to be a novel. I initially did not want to give it to anyone. But Jeremy Weate (then) of Cassava Republic heard I had a manuscript and bribed me with some fancy lunch at a Chinese Restaurant in Abuja and I showed him the manuscript. That is how Born on a Tuesday began its journey into the world. I worked for every single word. I worked like hell. I learnt the rules just so I could play with them. So yeah I’ll be damned if I let some idiot on the internet drag me into a conversation about whether what I spent years learning and perfecting (and still trying to) is AI generated. I will not even answer the question. I have spent too long doing this to have some motherfucker show up with Pangram to question my work.

In all this, the saddest lost is Grammarly. It used to just help detecting grammatical errors. Now, it would underline your humanly written sentence, and suggest you rewrite it with AI. No I didn't ask for that! There's a reason why I've written the way I have!

This is actually funny and genius. ‘My work has been rejected by…’

i hate when my adult responsibilities interfere with my reading hobby

You have no idea how disheartening it is for the many of us who have spent our entire lives trying, putting in the work, breaking ourselves and shedding skins just to do this writing this 'right'.

Here we are: Monday. Ready for a new week of rejection!

Using AI for preliminary research and maybe to review work is fine. But writers/journalists who use AI to actually write sentences are quite puzzling. Like... isn't sentence-making--the joy and challenges that come with it--the point of the whole enterprise?

for this week, “the madhouse”.

@savbre @brecht_dp @poetic_siren 🌚

@brecht_dp Hey, look on the bright side, now we can imagine what Joyce after a few days on meth might have sounded like—

Oh dear, the Granta / Commonwealth Short Story Prize thing. If anything, the story is just unreadable...

@poetic_siren 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Is this not twi for good morning?😭

@inkpharm @AFREADA Meant to say ‘well’ 😂

@let_alpha_write @AFREADA Indeed, we do. Thanks. ✨

Delighted to share that my short fiction “pigeons on my windowsill” is now published in @afreada, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Big thanks to Nancy and Chideraa for the amazing collaboration towards this publication. 🐦‍⬛🖤🪴 afreada.com/short-stories/…

Someone said X is where the party for writers is. So I am back here. 👀

Hi, my name is Alpha and I am a writer (i think). What about you?

@KemalOnor I made a post on my bookstagram account today about such a book. It won a major award last year.

Have you ever read a popular book so poorly written that it makes you mad?

@poetic_siren @ChimezieChika1 I know right 😂

@let_alpha_write @ChimezieChika1

How did this story win this prize??? If I can’t get any explanation that justifies the awarding of a story like this, then I will take it that the CW Prize has lost its credibility. It’s late for now. I will return to this tweet tomorrow.

Reading a book just to see “what the fuss is all about” is one of the worst ways to approach reading. You’re less likely to enjoy the story when you feel pressured to justify the book’s popularity while reading it. Don’t pressure yourself to read books because of everyone else

A lot of creatives are actually just looking for other obsessed people to build around.

@Foreverasheley 50 is impressive!!!!!

sometimes I look at all the rejections that hit my inbox everyday and it's easy to think I'm a terrible writer, but I've had some really great acceptances this year. So far, I've had over 50 pieces accepted to 40+ journals this year.