WHY I WRITE ABOUT STORY THE WAY I DO - by Emetekefe Akpovwovwo

I didn't learn to read until Primary Five. The moment I could, I wrote a story. A full prose piece, because apparently the first thing I wanted to do with reading was use it to build something. I told my father I wanted to turn it into a book, something children could buy and read. He told me to focus on my school books first. Fair enough. I was about twelve then. I didn't forget the story, though. Years later, in a college of education, studying Theatre Arts and English, my class was split into groups and told to write a stage play. Best group would get their play adapted into a film for the final-year production class. When it was my turn to pitch an idea to my group, I reached back for that same story I had written as a child who had just learned to read. They loved it. We built it into a play and it won. We later turned it into a screenplay. It became our final-year film. That's the first time I understood something that has shaped everything I have done since. A story doesn't have an expiry date. It has a shape and if the shape is right, it will find its way into whatever form it needs to How I Actually Learned This CraftNobody handed me a syllabus for story development. I built it the way most working writers do, sideways, through repetition and proximity to the work. I wrote for radio drama in college. After graduating, I went looking for screenplays online just to understand format and read far more of them than any class required. Friends would call me in as a production manager on their set and I would end up quietly reworking their scripts because I couldn't help myself. In 2021, a lady I barely knew approached me to pair up for a talent competition. We performed as radio presenters in Pidgin, different enough from the usual singing, dancing, contortion and spoken word acts that the judges took notice. We made it to the semifinals. At the pre-performance briefing, when we introduced ourselves, I said I was a writer. We didn’t make the finals but a few days or weeks later the organizers called. They had loved our broadcast and wanted to know if I wrote the script and if I could write them a documentary script. I could and did. I wrote and voiced it. In 2022, they came back and commissioned four more, which I also wrote and voiced. All of this happened before I had taken a single formal course in screenwriting. The formal training came after. I took some online courses. In 2024, at the Women in film and Television Conference, I joined the Women in the Arts workshop session and something shifted. I kept showing up, kept engaging, kept absorbing. During a later residency this year, a facilitator told the class to share their script with me if they wanted real feedback. That was the moment I realized the years of unofficial training had actually built something people could see and trust. Since then, the proof has kept stacking up: winning a pitch prize with my team at the SheWrites Masterclass this year, making the top ten finalists for the Beeta Art Playwright competition and moving within months from Script Writer to Creative Team Manager to Head of Story Development at the company I recently left. Along the way I trained in creative direction, visual post-production and acting for screen. All of these have impacted how I take stories from concept to execution. What’s Broken in How People Talk About StoryWhat frustrates me about most storytelling commentary online is that it comes from a place of not knowing what they are looking at.Someone who only enjoys comedy watches or reads a tragedy and says ‘this isn't even nice, it's not funny.‘ Well, it was never trying to be funny, that's not the genre. Genres exist for a reason; they are a contract between writer and audience. Criticizing a tragedy for failing to be a comedy isn't critique, it's a category error. Then comes the classic: ‘the film just isn't sweet.’ Sweet? Is it food? That's not feedback, it's a vibe with no analysis behind it.Real critique looks at what specifically isn't working; a character motivation that doesn't track, pacing that drags in act two, a theme the plot doesn't actually support and says it in a way aimed at making the next draft or the next film, better, not in a way aimed at the writer's ego. Most online commentary skips straight to the fight and skips the craft entirely. Take the recent backlash against Colours of Fire. Some of it was legitimate, genuine issues with the visual effects but scroll through the comments and most of it wasn’t critique at all. It was people declaring the film should never have reached the cinema and belonged on YouTube instead or asking Netflix to simply take it down. One commenter admitted upfront he was ‘anti-AI for his own reasons’ and let that colour everything he said about the film, not an argument about the story, just a stance he had already arrived at before pressing play. None of that tells the writers, the directors or any member of the production team anything they can actually use. It’s noise dressed up as opinion. That’s the gap I want to close, the space between ‘I didn’t like it’ and ‘here’s specifically what didn’t work and why,’ which is the only kind of feedback that ever makes anyone better at their craft. I can tell the difference between someone speaking from real knowledge of story and someone just venting.<img src="/media/inline_insight_image/Grey_Gold_Elegant_Participation_Certificate.png"/> What I Do Differently I read constantly. Beyond scripts, I read essays, research, articles and fiction because a writer who only draws from their own head runs dry fast. I bring other voices and other traditions into what I write and I want to do the same thing here: pull from African literature, cinema and performance in a space that too often defaults to Western frameworks when it talks about ‘how story works.‘ This is where I will break stories down properly, not ‘was it good,’ but why it worked, structurally and emotionally, and what any writer can take from it. It is for people who want to see story the way someone who has sat in the writer's room, the edit suite, and the director's chair sees it, because I have sat in all three. If that's the kind of storytelling conversation you have been looking for, you are in the right place. Welcome.

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