Author Birthday – 4 October – Tochi Onyebuchi

Happy Birthday, Tochi Onyebuchi, born on 4 October 1987.

Tochi Onyebuchi Quotes

1. When I’m in the thick of it, and I’m building the world, and I’m playing with the sentences, and I’m seeing the characters do things that are surprising to me—that’s Shangri-La.
2. Before, I would get very caught up in literary pyrotechnics, for the sake of literary pyrotechnics. I would do things to show off, but they didn’t serve the story. Writing YA was a way to get me to focus on having everything serve the story. Now, that doesn’t mean that my prose was shorn of any sort of lyrical felicity. But it all had to serve the story. It all had to move things forward.
3. I’m going to have to get smarter about my writing routine. But I don’t wait for the muse. If I only have an hourlong chunk of time, that might be the only time during the entire day that I get to write. So, I think, let me get stuff done. The writing always gets done, partly because I just enjoy it so much. But now I get paid to do it. It’s the ultimate privilege.
4. The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan was the book that made me want to be a writer. In the years prior, I had discovered I loved storytelling, and the external validation I got from my creative writing teachers in seventh and eighth grade seemed to indicate that I had a knack for it.
5. I fell in love with fiction long before I discovered narrative nonfiction (which wouldn’t happen until a year or two after college), so fiction was, and in many ways remains, the most effective method for me to write past the facts of an issue and into the heart of the matter.
6. Because I’m often working on so many things simultaneously and in different states of completion, an idea has enough time to germinate in my mind and find form by the time I’m able to put keystrokes to Scrivener.
7. Momentum is interesting in that respect, because when the idea first strikes (whether in the form of an image or a question I want to explore), I’ll want to write it right away on some love-at-first-sight tip. But I’ll be contractually obligated to complete other work in the meantime.
8. I’ll put together the broad brushstrokes of the idea (main character/s, place or what the place is based on, story arc), then I’ll start doing a chapter-by-chapter outline. And while I’m putting together the outline, I’ll begin drafting so that my headlights only show me the bit of road directly ahead of me and I can still be surprised by things that pop up in the drafting that may affect me later down the line.
9. The story I’m telling excites me, but the telling of it—the act of writing—excites me even more. It feels…good. Almost narcotic. I also love getting better at it.
10. Writing novels feels like I’m offering someone else the same promise of lengthy transport I myself seek when I’m reading.

Source for quotes 1-3: PublishersWeekly and 4-9: The Pen Ten and 10: Light Speed Magazine

Tochi Onyebuchi is an American science fiction and fantasy writer and former civil rights lawyer. He has earned degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. He is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Riot Baby, Goliath, and Harmattan Season. He was the writer for Marvel’s ‘Captain America: Symbol of Truth’ and ‘Black Panther: Legends’. His video game writing has appeared in Call of Duty: Vanguard, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. Onyebuchi is known for incorporating civil rights and Afrofuturism into his stories and novels. He uses science fiction and fantasy to examine race, power, injustice, colonialism, class, war, identity, and resistance. His speculative worlds are often futuristic, but the social questions at their centre are about the present. His fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and NAACP Image Awards. His latest book is the memoir-in-essays Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet. Follow him on Instagram.

Source for photograph: Author’s website

by Amanda Patterson
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