By Calixthus Okoruwa
By the time he published his first novel, “The Naked Face,” Sidney Sheldon was already an accomplished screen writer. He’d won an Oscar and a Tony. And his tv shows drew audiences in their millions weekly.
Sheldon hadn’t set out to become a novelist. “The Naked Face” was an accident. He was writing a screenplay, when he got stuck in an intractable plot. He abandoned the screenplay altogether, but the plot wouldn’t leave him alone until he decided to convert the screenplay into a novel.
Writing a novel unleashed something new in Sidney Sheldon. It gave him freedom, fun, and fulfillment.
“When you write a movie or a play,” said Sheldon, “Yours is but one voice in a cacophony of opinions. You deal with a producer who decrees a scene too expensive, a director who changes your female lead to a man, an actor who insists, ‘My character would never say that’. But when you write a novel, you alone are the producer, director, and cast. You decide the setting and whether to make the character rich or poor, healthy or ill, heroic or evil. It’s all you. I loved that.”
Sheldon’s second novel, “The Other Side of Midnight,” sold millions of copies, entrenching him as an outstanding novelist.
“Previously only those in the entertainment industry appreciated my talents. If you poll someone on the street about his favourite movie, he’ll tell you the title and the star. Ask him who wrote the screenplay and he’ll draw a blank. With the novel, the author is the star.”
Nigeria’s Ifeanyi Atueyi wrote neither screenplays nor novels. However, his professional trajectory bears uncanny resemblance to that of Sidney Sheldon. Upon graduating as a pharmacist, he worked at different pharmaceutical establishments – Toki Pharmacy, Nigerian Chemical Services, Briscoe Pharmaceuticals. He achieved results, got paid good money, lived well. But there was a restlessness, a symptom of emptiness in him. He was unfulfilled professionally.
It wasn’t until Pharmanews that Atueyi completely doused his restlessness and unleashed the zeal that would define the rest of his life. Pharmanews, the pharmaceutical newspaper accidentally invented by Atueyi, chronicled not only drug discovery, manufacture, marketing, and distribution, it also showcased the pharmacists driving these processes…in news and picture stories, opinion articles, features, analyses, interviews and more.
Pharmanews is beloved by Nigeria’s pharmacists and since its debut in May 1979, has never missed an edition. It ranks among Nigeria’s most enduring publications.
Sheldon died in 2008, leaving a formidable legacy. Atueyi passed on in July 2025 leaving an equally formidable legacy, Pharmanews, with thousands of pharmacists and health practitioners, lamenting his demise.
As Sheldon said, if he hadn’t accidentally discovered his mission to become a novelist, he still would have made good money, enjoyed his career and family. But he never would have left his mark and would never have had as much fun. Reading through Atueyi’s autobiography, “My Life and Pharmanews,” while he too, would have made a lot of money and enjoyed his family, he would not have left his mark nor found the fulfillment that Pharmanews gave him.
Both men exemplify the Steve Jobs maxim that to be truly fulfilled and perform great work, you must love what you do.
