Working papers · 2019 — present · Accra & Lisbon
I write about attention,
craft, and the slow work
of getting things right.
— from On Being Slow To Be Right, working paper no. 14
Selected work
Six pieces I still stand behind. Each one started as a note in a pocket notebook and took between four months and three years to finish. Where a piece is still moving, I've said so. Reprints and translations are listed on the cards where they exist.
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No. 14
On Being Slow To Be Right
An argument that the useful unit of intellectual work isn't the idea but the revision. Built from four years of my own notebooks, plus interviews with a bridge engineer, a pastry chef, and a copy editor at a newspaper that no longer prints. Still in draft — section three keeps collapsing.
Draft available on request · excerpts read at the Accra Book Festival, Nov 2025
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No. 11
The Kitchen Table Archive
My grandmother kept every receipt, ticket stub, and school report from 1961 to 2003 in a biscuit tin. This is an attempt to read a life out of the paper it left behind — and an honest accounting of how much I got wrong.
Reprinted in The Best American Essays 2025 · translated into Portuguese for Granta Portugal
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No. 09
Nobody Reads The Second Paragraph
On the strange economics of the opening line. I spent a month watching how eleven editors at three publications decided what to read, and the answer was less flattering to writers than we'd like. Includes a short, unsentimental guide to writing a first sentence that survives.
Most-quoted piece · used in two newsroom training programmes, one of which I did not consent to
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No. 07
Two Cities, One Desk
I moved my whole working life between Accra and Lisbon for eighteen months and kept a strict log of every hour. What I found was that the commute wasn't the cost — the cost was the fortnight it took each time to remember what I'd been thinking about.
Commissioned by a magazine that folded before publication · published independently, 2022
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No. 04
Against The Reading List
A short, slightly rude book about the habit of treating books as a queue to be cleared. Written after I counted the unread volumes on my own shelf and found 214 of them. I have since read nine.
Second printing, 2023 · 1,400 copies sold, mostly to people who have not read it
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No. 01
What The Workshop Knows
The first thing I published that I'd still defend. Six weeks in a furniture workshop in Kumasi, watching men who could not explain their own skill. The piece is mostly about the gap between knowing how and being able to say how.
Where the whole file started · the workshop closed in 2021, the benches went to a school in Tafo
Notes
Things too small for a paper and too useful to throw away. Posted irregularly, whenever one of them earns its place. No archive, no search — if you want to find one again, you'll have to remember when you read it.
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12 Feb 2026
Rewrote the same paragraph eleven times today. On the twelfth it was worse than the first. Kept the first. This is the whole method and I resent how well it works.
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29 Jan 2026
A reader in Nairobi sent me a photograph of her own biscuit tin. I had not asked for it. It is now pinned above the desk and it has changed how I think about the ending of the essay.
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04 Jan 2026
Rule for the year: no new projects until paper no. 14 is finished. It is the 4th of January and I have already broken this rule twice. Both times for things that were, admittedly, quite good.
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18 Nov 2025
The pastry chef told me she throws away one in four batches on purpose, so that she never gets comfortable. I have thought about this every working day since.
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02 Oct 2025
Bought a second-hand typewriter for £40. Used it for a week. It made my sentences shorter and my thinking no better. Sold it for £35 and kept the sentences.
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21 Aug 2025
A sub-editor I worked with in 2014 could tell you the word count of any paragraph to within five words, by eye. I have never once needed this skill and I have never stopped wanting it.
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09 Jun 2025
Someone asked me at a reading what my process is. I said I get up early and disappoint myself until lunchtime. They laughed, then wrote it down, which worried me.
About
I was born in Kumasi and grew up mostly in the back of a stationery shop my mother ran on Adum Road. That is probably where the paper habit started — I spent a decade of afternoons surrounded by things designed to be written on and nothing much to write.
I studied philosophy badly at university, then spent six years as a sub-editor at a business daily, which taught me more about writing than the degree did. I left in 2018 to work on my own material and have been doing that since, with a two-year detour writing speeches for someone I will not name.
My work tends to circle the same few questions: why attention is so hard to hold, why skill resists explanation, and what it actually costs a person to be careful in a world that rewards being fast. I write slowly and revise a great deal. Roughly one in five things I start gets finished, and I've made peace with that ratio.
I work from two desks — one in Osu, Accra, and one in a shared building in Lisbon's Graça. I move between them about three times a year and I've stopped pretending this is efficient.
I teach one short course a year on long-form nonfiction, usually in the spring, usually to twelve people. I take on two or three editorial consultations a year and I'm honest with people when their project isn't ready.
If you're writing something and you're stuck, you can write to me. I answer most letters, though it sometimes takes a fortnight.
How the work gets made
Everything starts longhand in a pocket notebook — one per quarter, about ninety pages each, and I keep all of them. A piece only moves to the desk when I've written the same argument three times in three different notebooks without noticing I was repeating myself. That repetition is the signal; it means the thing is actually mine and not borrowed from whatever I read that week.
Draft two is typed, printed, and read aloud in the room. Anything I stumble over gets cut, which is why my sentences are shorter than they used to be and why my first drafts are now twice as long. I keep a file of everything I've cut — currently about 340,000 words — and I go back through it roughly once a year. About one in twenty cuts turns out to have been right the first time, and those go back in.
- Based
- Osu, Accra & Graça, Lisbon
- Working on
- Working paper no. 14, On Being Slow To Be Right
- Teaching
- Long-form nonfiction, one course each spring
- Represented by
- Adjoa Mensah, Accra
- Correspondence
- Letters answered in the order they arrive, usually within two weeks
- Consultations
- Two or three a year, on manuscripts over 4,000 words
- Languages
- English, Twi, working Portuguese
Contact
For commissions, editorial consultations, or a note about something you've read here. I read everything; I answer most of it. If you're asking me to read a manuscript, tell me the word count and what you think is wrong with it — that second part saves us both a fortnight.
Post P.O. Box 4412, Osu, Accra, Ghana
Studio 2nd floor, 17 Nkrumah Close, Osu — buzzer 4, up the outside stairs
Lisbon Rua da Voz do Operário 8, Graça — by appointment only
Letters P.O. Box 4412, Osu, Accra, Ghana — I read paper post, and I answer it
Elsewhere Newsletter (quarterly, four times a year, no more) · Reading list (updated when I finish something)