Writing Novel Organize

TONY Monye: Banker who wrote biggest novel in Nigeria

Perhaps you haven’t come across a novel like this by a Nigerian. At 743 pages, Tony Monye’s Between a Valley and a Plain is a real whopper. Set in Nigeria, the story glissades across generations, recounting the tale of a determined young man, Chibia, as he passes through poverty, love and vengeance.

It also bristles with grief-stricken encounters during the three-year Nigeria civil war.
It is his first book, but the energy deployed in writing it is tremendous. The author is a banker by profession and a writer by inclination. “I should say I developed the interest for writing very early, but I don’t know about being born a writer,” he begins placidly.

We are meeting for the first time at the new office of her publishers, Oracle Books, this Sunday evening, close to the University of Lagos. Sitting beside him is Oracle Books CEO, Promise Ogochukwu. Amid the sapphire walls and transuding lights from the shutters, his light complexion glistens and his face crinkles up in a smile. “I picked particular interest in words constructions very early in life,” he recalls.

But it wasn’t until 1985 that he started taking creative writing seriously. Then, he had a number of friends he was competing with on the number of books each person would read, from writers on the Heinemann African Writers series, to Jeffrey Archer and James Hardly Chase.
“The idea for this novel has always been in me,” he says with raised decibels. “You will be shocked that the inspiration came from the life and times of an individual in the book, Monye, and not Chibia as you are wont to think. So, other characters were fitted in. I just wanted to tell the story of Monye, who my dad and uncles told me much about,” he draws a wistful pause.

You might be disinclined to believe that Between a Valley & a Plain is less of exquisite memory and more of subtle perception, but it is. Monye’s lips show a verbal tic as he says, “Most of the things in the book are my imagination, apart from what I was told by my dad and relatives. It took me three years to complete the book, because of my job as a banker.” 

An aspect of the novel is a war narrative.

Writing a Novel in Tinderbox – Organize with Color

As I’m working on writing a novel using Eastgate’s Tinderbox to organize my notes, I’m continuing to think in terms of best practices. So far, I keeping hearing from users that it’s best to start simple and organize your notes in Map View . This is the easiest and most intuitive way to use Tinderbox. Map View also helps you avoid “premature commitment,” getting locked into a structure before you’ve completely sorted it out.

Tinderbox also gives you a lot of options for marking notes by color scheme. You can use one of 17 default colors from the Tinderbox palette or you can create your own custom colors.

When Using Color, Less is More

The thing to keep in mind when using color to organize your work is that you really have fewer choices than you might imagine. After all, there are 256 “web safe” colors alone, who could possibly use that many categories in their work?

But if you look at a color wheel you’ll see right away that you only have three completely distinct choices, the primary colors red, yellow and blue. After those three choices you have combinations, the secondary colors green, orange and purple. Following this you have tertiary colors that are even less distinct and less likely to stand apart from each other.

Notice how orange doesn’t stand apart from red and purple is very close to blue on the color wheel above. With every additional color choice the level of distinctiveness diminishes.

Consider the large number of elements that you might want to track when writing your novel in Tinderbox:

On my first stab at this I simply assigned colors to characters and other elements willy-nilly. It quickly became cluttered and color became less helpful than I imagined for keeping certain notes visible. I think a better approach would be to organize my notes using a color wheel. If I only have three categories (red, blue, yellow) for my characters, what would those categories be? If I only have four neutral colors for my scenic elements (warm gray, cool gray, black, white), what would those categories be?

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