Okay readers, time for the first short story on our list, “Ghosts,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As promised, here is one thing I noticed about Adichie’s writing and one idea the story gave me for my own writing.
One Thing I Noticed: The story is written from the first-person singular point of view. The narrator is a retired professor who runs into an old acquaintance who he thought died years ago. The two have a somewhat tentative conversation, and the narrator realizes how much their paths have diverged. Rather than tell us about the main character through third-person exposition, Adichie gives us his background story in bits and pieces, through the conversation and through the memories that the conversation sparks in the narrator’s mind.
First-person is a good point of view to use when blurring the line between what is real (here, what happened to the narrator’s family after the war) and what may not be (the visions of his wife’s ghost visiting him) because everything that is happening to the narrator is real, at least to him.
One Idea: Write a story about a person who does not believe in ghosts and is visited by one.
* * *
Read more here about Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War.
And check out both Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun and Chinua Achebe’s (author of Things Fall Apart) 2013 memoir There Was a Country.
If you would like to read ahead this month, here is the whole reading list of short stories. Happy reading!