Alexander McCall Smith - role model for the humble writer
28 October 2018
PHIL FITZPATRICK
TUMBY BAY - When I published the first of my Inspector Metau books about an elderly but shrewd policeman in Port Moresby, a couple of reviewers obliquely compared it to the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith.
I had vaguely heard of McCall Smith and the comments prompted me to read his books. I quickly became hooked and have been a devoted fan of Mama Precious Ramotswe and her detective agency in Gaborone, Botswana, ever since.
I am currently reading the nineteenth in the series, ‘The Colours of all the Cattle’.
The series is hugely popular and has sold over 20 million copies in English alone since the first book came out in 1998.
As with many popular book series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency has resulted in many copycats. Thankfully my three Inspector Metau books don’t fall into this category.
As for the writing, I’m way out of McCall Smith’s league in so many ways.
We were both born in 1948. I’ve published about a dozen books. He’s published well over 80 and is still going strong.
McCall Smith’s output is prodigious. His first book was a children’s story, ‘The White Hippo’, published in 1980. Since then he’s averaged about two books a year.
When he’s at home in Edinburgh, Scotland, he churns out 5,000 words a day. He even writes when he’s travelling but slows down a bit to 2-3,000 words a day. In full flight he averages about 1,000 words an hour.
I get books sent to me for editing or publication that hardly total 30,000 words. The authors think they are full length novels. It would take McCall Smith less than a week to produce one of similar length. He could knock out 50 of them in a year.
What got me hooked on The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series was the setting and the simple style. McCall Smith has written several other series set in Scotland and other places but they don’t appeal to me.
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency setting is Botswana, a sub-Saharan nation of about two million people in Western Africa. Like its neighbour, Namibia, it has always been a stable representative democracy. Both places are about the same size and have healthy growing economies.
They are the antithesis of what we perceive when we consider African nations plagued by corruption and ruled by violent dictators. And Namibia makes an incredibly good beer. Windhoek Lager is even better than SP.
The style of McCall Smith’s books, especially The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, is deceptively simple. They describe everyday events in plain English. They are genial, mundane and fascinating all at the same time.
They are the sort of books I would expect to be popular in Papua New Guinea. I’ve seen plenty of copies in second hand stores so hopefully people are reading them.
They are, in fact, reminiscent of several Papua New Guinean writers. Here I’m thinking about Baka Bina’s ‘Man of Calibre’, Emmanuel Peni’s ‘Sibona’ and Francis Nii’s ‘Paradise in Peril’.
McCall Smith started out by entering a literary competition. He submitted a novel and a children’s book. The children’s book won. After that his writing took off like a rocket.
His secret seems to be an uncanny sense of the ordinary, a wry sense of humour and lots of hard but enjoyable work.
Simple, really.
Phil - I wish it were as simple as Mr McCall Smith writes it.
But if he can write some fascinating story about the Third World and put out all its complex intricacies, I'm sure we can find in PNG someone who can do that with our own PNG ways and pasin.
They just have to start putting pen and ideas to paper.
A Papua New Guinean can tell his stories in a way no other person can. I may be wrong here but if a Scottish person can write successfully of a Botswanian thing, then it is possible for an expatriate to write all things PNG. Mind you, this Scot seems to have made a real killing here whilst he was at it.
My favorite African story is Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart'. I thought Chinua told the most simple African story without having to tell the African culture.
I think I may have read a copycat of Mr McCall Smith stories somewhere but I think I might be mistaking it with the vet story of another Scot - James Herriot's 'A Country Practice'.
Anyway, thank you Phil, you keep on burning the fire in us in this endeavor of free writing. I am sure Emmanual Peni and Francis Nii will agree with me that we take kudos from you mentioning us again and again.
It is a chore to keep on writing and we hope that we will produce some more. Personally I feel that my late nights are futile but I may get over it.
Academic writing seem to flourish well here. There has been a flurry of launches recently and Dr Eric Kwa's launch of his PNG Law Dictionary has a few Tok Pisin words that have got into the legal realm. It was a timely publication.
A few PNGns are faring well on the writing scene. David Gonol through Marapa Publications and Jordan Dean through JDT publications are assisting a lot of other writers to publish their works.
You have written about the pitfalls of publishing before and would like to ask if you if you can re-state what an average reader would like to see in a published work.
Posted by: Baka Bina | 28 October 2018 at 08:39 PM