Not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well. - Peace Adzo Medie

But when I'm thinking about starting a book, I want in those first few pages for the reader to get a good sense of who the main characters are, but also a good sense of the tension or conflict that is going to propel the book forward. So in those first few pages or the first chapter, by the time you get to the end of that chapter, you have a good sense of the characters, and you have a good sense of what is driving them, and what is driving the story. That's what I aim for.

In the social sciences, we know. . . that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them.

So my books never end up being the books that I planned. His Only Wife was a very different story when I started writing it. I was returning to Ghana and His Only Wife started off with a main character who in some ways shared some similarities with my own life - someone living in the US and coming back to Ghana after graduate school. I'm sure you can see that Afi in His Only Wife is not that person, so that shows you how much my writing changes once I begin writing.