Nyani Nkrumah: On Putting the Literary Puzzle Together

Nyani Nkrumah was born in Boston and raised in Accra, Ghana, and Harare, Zimbabwe. Her love of writing comes from her mother, a teacher who entertained her children by reciting Shakespeare during car rides to school.

She’s a dual biology and black studies major at Amherst, has a masters from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D from Cornell, and is a Fulbright Scholar. She lives in the D.C. area with her husband and two children. Learn more at nyaninkrumah.com, and find her on Twitter and Instagram.

In this post, Nyani discusses her process of writing and editing her debut literary novel, Wade in the Water, her advice for writers, and more!

Name: Nyani Nkrumah
Literary agent: Charlotte Sheedy
Book title: Wade in the Water
Publisher: Amistad
Release date: January 17, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: Set in 1980s rural Mississippi, Wade in the Water is a story about the unlikely friendship between Ella, a precocious and unloved 11-year-old black girl, and Katherine, a mysterious white researcher, who moves into Ella’s all Black neighborhood. The town folk are immediately suspicious, but Ella and Katherine are drawn into a friendship that drowns out the outside world … until it doesn’t, and the relationship grows increasingly fraught as Ella unwittingly pushes against Katherine’s carefully constructed boundaries that guard secrets and a complicated past.

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That’s a hard question to answer because I didn’t set out to write this particular story. However, there are many things that have influenced the story: I am an avid reader, and I am always pulled into an adult book that has a child narrator.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is still one of my favorites. I wanted to invoke a similar warm, rich narrative experience, within the context of a story that is about the coming of age of this unwanted, black girl. I also love characters that are so well developed that you feel everything they go through. For a long time, my favorite author was Catherine Cookson, a U.K. author whose characters jump off the page.

So, I developed a book with characters you get to know very well. In terms of the themes in the book—family, class, race, color, love, hate—these come from a kaleidoscope of things, some of which relate to the jigsaw puzzle that is me. For example, I grew up in two vastly different countries—one country had no color dimensions or context and in the other, color pervaded every aspect of social interactions.

This made me think deeply about issues of race and color, what these really mean, and how to dismantle stereotypes. Of course, there are other influences based on the people I meet, my research for the book, and from my own vivid imagination.

I was working on another manuscript and reached a point, probably halfway, when I knew I could not go any further. I had just reached a massive roadblock. I kept the first few chapters I loved and scrapped the rest. It took me a while to start again but when I did, this ultimately became Wade in the Water. The entire process for the second take took about six years. This includes myriad interruptions including my full-time job, kids, and of course a pandemic.

The novel has always changed slightly because I am someone who cannot stop fiddling with words. I write a chapter and then I spend a lot of time editing, just changing one word here, one phrase or paragraph there, rereading and re-editing. I think I edit more than I write. There were a couple of big changes.

The first came after a visit to Memphis, Tenn. I was at a museum and just at the corner of my eye I saw a newspaper clipping displayed on a wall. Now, I had seen that clipping many times before in other museums and initially walked past it. But for some reason that day, I stopped, went back, and really saw something I hadn’t seen before. I am being deliberately vague here because the story behind the news article is now part of the novel.

The other change I made was to flesh out Katherine’s character more than I did in earlier drafts because of my readers’ questions and comments. These were key in helping me identify sections that needed more attention.

Finding an agent is never easy, particularly if you are a debut author. Getting my agent was what I call my miracle moment. After querying many, many agents, I got a call from an agent saying how much she loved my book. The surprise—I had never queried her, never sent her any pages. If I were to pick my top 10 dream agents, she would have been one of them, but she was closed to queries.

I think to this day we both have different versions of how this might have happened, including another agent I had queried sending her my manuscript, but whatever the case, it’s a great story to tell.

There are constant surprises because I never write out an outline, nor do I plan the storyline. I let the characters lead, and like a jigsaw puzzle, it comes together in a way that I could never have predicted. The intensive editing as I write aids this process, but I think that the fact that I do not write daily or even weekly, helps my style of writing—it gives me time to let the characters marinade in my head.

When I reread the last chapter I have written after a long hiatus, it helps me get the distance and perspective I need to make changes. However, once in a while, I will reread the chapter and wonder (sometimes in horror, other times in amazement), Did I actually write this?

I used to belong to a book group for about eight years or so. We were a cross-section of women from all walks of life who came together once a month to discuss a novel we had voted to read. I would like my readers to experience the same thing I got out of some of my favorite books that were interesting and engrossing, so much so that I didn’t want to put them down; books that made me think, long after I had turned the final page; and finally, books that I wanted to discuss with others.

Follow what works for you. If, like me, you have a full-time job, kids, and a host of other things going on, it’s more important that you write when you can than to forgo writing. Find your moments of calm, however short they are, and start.

Don’t get discouraged that you haven’t hours to write, or you can’t get beyond a few lines at a time. Write a sentence or a paragraph. Pick it up again the next time you have those moments of calm, or the next time you just have the urge to write.

It’s like knitting, a little at a time also works.

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