How Trees Helped Ben Okri To Write His New Children’s Book – Literary Hub

An unspoken tradition hints that going to the source is good for the story you want to write. The trouble often is that we have no idea what that source may be. Sometimes we think it is sheer research and we spend time in libraries. Often, we think it’s where the action of the proposed work takes place. So, like Hemingway, we go to battles or bullfights. I think these are useful if you can do them or afford the travel, though there is a fallacy involved in thinking that the world, in and of itself, is the constant source of infallible research, when the world changes from day to day.

When I came to writing Every Leaf a Hallelujah, a book for the eternal child in us, I pondered how I was going to tell this tale. I knew I wanted to set it in the outskirts of Lagos. I knew its heroine would be a young girl. I didn’t have the story, only a strong impulse to tell a tale about trees and forests and our relationship to nature. For many weeks nothing happened.

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