Unveiling the Mind of a Rising Star

An Interview with Didacus Masanja, Author of Octal Rules & Protégé

It takes time and needs patience

DIDACUS MASANJA

Congratulations on your latest book, Protégé! Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write this collection?

Thank you so much! I have always been an enthusiast on written words, the power it has in carrying motions in a single word or sentence it’s unbelievable.

Octal Rules was your first book. Looking back, how do you think your writing has evolved between that first book and this latest one?

So I think after I finished my first book, which is “The Octal Rules”, the immediate idea which came to my head was writing a Poetry collection book and went for it. Immediately I was done writing “The Octal Rules”, I started writing another book before I even published the first book.

My writing has significantly evolved, it changed from my style, basically, when I wrote the first book, I can say I was an amateur in writing basically, I didn’t know how to use words here and there. Basically, I didn’t know how to use my foundational skills I had in school but when I was writing Protégé, I developed my own style of writing, it’s like a way I am able to tell a story in poetry using specific words without using words that really hit to the point.

My writing has evolved in a huge way from writing motivational or basically self help books to writing poetry is a big step for me.

I would say there are some poetry that are basically motivational you could say but it’s more of a story telling way and I like that style and I believe that the kind of style would like to stick on when writing poetry because it engages the reader, it gives them an opportunity to have a picture in their head and try to formulate probably a movie or something.

What themes does your books explore The Octal Rules and Protégé what drew you to these topics, and how do you see them fitting into our current cultural moment?

So, Octal Rules theme was to give people motivation, it was a book that gave someone encouragement in every obstacles they were facing in their life, mostly to pursue greatness that was the theme.

But when it comes to Protégé, it’s a book filled with many themes, has its own lessons, it also has it’s own themes. You will have poems that are themed on Loss, poems that are themed on Love, a lot, even motivations, that’s why I’m saying Protégé is a huge collection filled with lessons, filled with stories that are interesting to each and every person of every age.

Your work often features unique forms and structures. Can you talk about your approach to form and how it influences your writing process?

Basically, how I structure my writing I have a complicated form of how I structure my writing because I might end up writing a poem, I might write 3, 4 lines like in 1 hour then sit down, later probably when I’m reading a book or something or just enjoying my time, taking a walk, an idea comes up and I probably continue writing and then when I get back reading the poem through out, I find out that there are some lines that have to be worked on even more, so I get back to them.

For me, I might stick to a poem for probably 2, 3, even 5 days until it becomes perfect to me; that’s the structure that I have and I might be a slow writer but that has been my writing structure. So, I believe for me to get to the point of writing 5 to 6 books, I have to consistently write every single day whether it’s going to be a paragraph, a single page, that’s what I have to do.