But, even when I found my voice, it still came out in a stammer. He, ever warm and pleasant says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” And, my first words to him were accusatory: “it’s been a pleasure for at least five years and you have greeted me the same way ever since.” He replied, “I remember you, maybe not your face, but your name, Tolu Daniel, right?” There were about five of us standing there with him. But I doubt if any of them saw what those words did to me, how if he never said anything else, I probably wouldn’t mind. I thought of the moment before, when someone in the audience during the reading had asked how he felt getting his writing validated by VS Naipaul, Philip Roth, and others. Cole had replied that when he was a younger writer, he had buried himself in knowing the work so much and his knowledge has helped him tune his bullshit detector. He is able to recognize what good writing is and what bad writing is.

The reply validated me, and I had felt like I needed to hear it again in proper parlance. For the first few years after I began writing, I didn’t really have an understanding of what I was doing. So, I just wrote stories and sent them out for awards and prize considerations. Then, I began to yearn to get published in literary journals and would spend hours poring through submission guidelines to send my work. Those periods were the hardest because I would wait for replies that were never going to come and yet I kept producing stuff and sending.

One day I got a reply. It came with an advice to stop wasting my time writing as my writing wasn’t even worthy of being called mediocre. I was hurt. I stopped sending my work out and instead focused more on reading the journals and magazines where I wanted to see my work. I also joined a reading club where reading one book a week was compulsory. I stopped writing entirely because I realized that I had never known how to write shit. I read so much that I began to feel a sort of distaste for some stories my friends shared with me. I started to see places that needed corrections and so I began doing edits and writing suggestions about how certain narratives would work better. I even got an editing manual, which aided me. I would take books I really enjoyed reading, rewrite first chapters, compare mine with the originals, and discard them. It was strenuous work but in time it paid off. So, it was incredibly validating to find a writer I looked up to reinforce that the work, not the attention or the fame, is key.

Teju Cole didn’t have enough time to say more. But I imagine that sometime soon, we will meet again. And this time – like the saying eponymous to the title of his novella, every day is for the thief but one day is for the owner – it will be my time.