In this occasional series, "How They Got Published – Stories of Writing Success", we look at how writers got their very first contract; the story of how that happened. Many writers are so very willing to share their advice with other hopeful writers. This week, I'm looking at the massive best-seller, The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
She wrote the first draft of The Girl With The Louding Voice in eight months during the MA course, and quickly entered it into the Bath Novel Awards for unpublished manuscripts. Having won the competition and secured an agent she began revising the book –– that took about three years. The novel was finally published after a bidding war in 2020 and soon gained critical acclaim.
The Girl With the Louding Voice is set in Nigeria, Daré’s home country, and focuses on 14-year-old Adunni as she is taken out of school by her poverty-stricken, widowed father and sold to become the third wife of a local man. When Adunni runs away to Lagos, dangers await her. She effectively becomes a slave to a wealthy family. But Adunni dreams of continuing her education and finding a voice to stand up for herself and girls like her.
One of the most resonant areas of the novel are the voices of other young, poor girls, and it was interesting see their various opinions of what is happening to them. Early on, we meet Enitan, Adunni’s best friend. Her approach to marriage is at odds with Adunni’s; she loves make up and hair-do’s, and is excited about this development in her friend’s life. Later, as Adunni moves into her husband’s compound, she meets Kiki, his daughter by his first wife, who is also 14 and about to be married. She is sanguine about this – men have everything, she explains to Adunni. They own everything. They have all the power. Kiki also wants to continue at school and become a dress designer and she plans to sweet talk her husband into paying up. If men have all the power, she argues, then the best thing for a girl is to grab a man.
Just a few years older than Adunni is the second wife, who is pregnant. Her story is harrowing, and her demise cuts short Adunni’s life in the compound. She runs away in fear of her life, and finds herself in Lagos, working for Big Madam for no wage. Here, the investigation by Daré into the superstitions around pregnancy continue when we meet Ms Tia, a neighbour of Big Madam, who recognises the qualities and spirit in Adunni and helps her prepare to take a scholarship to a prestigious school. She has so far avoided getting pregnant, but begins to decide she would like to have a child with her husband. She agrees to undergo a shocking ritual to begin the process.
As the story of all these women progress, Adunni also begins to investigate the mystery of the previous maid; Rebecca disappeared after being made pregnant by Big Madam’s wastrel husband. As Adunni wonders: “Why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?”
The twists and turns are held together with a clever control of language by Daré. The story is told in the first person by Adunni, who’s voice uses a country dialect. Meanwhile this is countered by the characters in Lagos, who speak very standard English.
Daré talks about the development of this voice to Aramide Akintimehin, writing for the Assembly Website. ‘I started the first draft about a week before I was due to submit about 3,000 words to my dissertation supervisor. I wrote the first sentence in my character’s voice and did not stop writing until I had the required 3,000 words. When I went to see him a week later for his review and assessment, I was pleasantly surprised when he told me that he loved it… I felt that I needed to break [Adunni’s] English down and break myself down in the process to understand her, so that she could be understood by anyone else who’s reading it…I wanted it to be nonstandard English…
Later in the book Adunni comes to the realisation that, just because the rich Lagos women speak better English than she does, they are not better people. Daré wanted to make this point strongly in the novel – ‘it’s just a language. It’s not a measure of intelligence.’I wanted to explore the amount of talent and dreams and intelligence that we kill and waste when we don’t allow these girls to go to school, when we hire these young girls and get them to work. I wanted to show that this was a girl that needs to be up at 4 a.m. in the morning. She’s intelligent, and if she was given a chance, and other young girls in the world, they will shine and they will thrive.’
The inspiration for Abi Daré’s first book struck when one of her daughters, then 8, didn’t feel like unloading the dishwasher. Daré told her that there were girls her age in Nigeria who did housework for a living. This conversation gave Daré a new perspective on something that was common among middle-class families like the one in which she was raised: employing young girls as so-called housemaids.
Daré admitted that for years she wrote quietly, and had moments where she felt like giving up. Taking the MA in Creative Writing helped her gain the confidence to complete this debut novel, get it published and continue writing. She says; I just wanted to create a character that shows that a girl can be a fighter.… I wanted her to be a role model. So if you create a character and you want that character to be a role model, she has to be able to stand up for something. If you don’t stand up for something, you fall for everything. And so that’s why I wanted to create this character that young girls could look up to her, older women, even I looked up to Adunni when I was writing the book.
If you would like to read all the blogposts in this series, click here
