Writing Advice...

Books and classes on writing will fill your head with disparate ideas about how to approach your story. Some authors will tell you to write about what you know and others will tell you to write about what interests you. Because I believe there is freedom within structure, I think it's a good idea to create an outline of each story. An outline is like a trail of popcorn leading out of the woods. You can write short stories of ten pages or more with no expectations of what they might become.


Working Outside Your Comfort Zone

Keep writing playful and lay off the cash-and-prizes pressure. To keep your creativity limber, choose to focus on something outside your comfort zone. And to assuage the terror, write down what you'll have to learn to write about historical figures, true crime, hospital settings or zombies. Writing about things that engage your mind, imagination and make you run to the computer or notebook each day is the samadhi of writing.

Fictionalized or Heightened Creative Nonfiction

It's tricky writing about family, old friends and childhood contexts. I always wonder how much we have permission to reveal about others' lives. Any criticism of an individual's behavior begs an exploration of his or her character and how that person became the evil-doer in a family or among a group of friends. Would you write your personal narrative as a fable? Would you consider stating the facts as they were with no regard about where you'd spend Christmas?

Where SHOULD ideas come from?

There is no such thing as a magical spout of story ideas from which we all fill our cups. We writers are wanderers in search of the next interesting thread and the desire to see where it leads. All art begins with desire. Writing from your navel has some definite advantages and staying there in the nebulous imagination of your past can be something that stunts creative growth.
Sometimes, I find it important to explore why I want to limit myself in my writing choices. Is it laziness to want to write from and about one's personal experience? Is there are a fear of being inadequate as a researcher that keeps some writers from writing a historical novel?
As a person who loves writing advice, I can say the best advice is to follow what motivates you to get to the pen and paper or computer. When you compare yourself to those writing in your favorite genre, you might become immobilized. And picking up on the latest writing trends feels like a cash grab in a clear booth on a game show. Ideas come from everywhere and the stories we weave can become bigger as we trust our abilities to learn new things and ask questions. Being an introvert and writer doesn't mean you never talk to librarians -- they are great resources. The human touch has not yet lost its touch, and when you're stuck, making calls to connect with your tribe or talking to humans at the local drugstore can break the spell of obsessive focus on rearranging the alphabet.

Watching to Write Visually

I have been watching a lot of TV, doing my TV writing Masterclass homework, and I see a strange theme in ‘family’ shows. The old formula of innocuous parents who at 40 already had no clue about how the world works and the smart-ass teenagers who never look at their parents as human beings is disappearing... but maybe, this still exists on network TV, which I don’t watch.
But on the streaming channels, there is a prevalence of dystopian parenting in which family members live like roommates with the occasional reminder that some of the humans are parental units (to quote Saturday Night Live). The Family Ties, The Cosby Show and Family, which were stalwarts Of family normalcy and unity have been replaced by Transparent, Ozark and Girls — and in all these shows, the parents haven’t figured it all out and, in some cases, major parts of their identities are still up in the air.
The ‘Father Knows Best’ Type Of shows with nuclear families, family meetings to discuss issues concerning the family and making big life decisions was meant to be prescriptive. And it was an idealistic goal for families that most didn’t even attempt. Families sat together to watch shows in which families never sat down to watch families on TV because they were too busy being families. Real families really admired fake TV families and nodded in agreement at the lessons in the end.
So, I think TV families, unless you’re talking about a comedy, have become descriptive — taking cues from the most nightmarish headlines about family dynamics.

The new Tv families are definitely not prescriptive.
There is enough struggle, misery and disaster in each episode to yell ‘Don’t do what we do!‘

But in the new family dynamic, we see the family version of a breakup - whereas a lover might say ‘let’s just be friends,’ Tv family members say, ‘Hey, let’s just be roommates and if you want to be an emancipated Minor, just let me know what I need to sign.’

the silence is eclectic by Odilia Rivera-Santos

I have been on a long sabbatical from blogposting. .. watching the whirlwind of social media activity from a safe distance and racing through winter as I overuse the gerund. 

I've been teaching four completely different groups of students, which served my writing well. 

There are new voices added to the tidy collection of voice possibilities.

I've worked with students from Kazakhstan, Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, France, and the Dominican Republic. 

In-between the busyness of working with human beings, I have continued work on creative projects -- on the bus, in bed right before falling into the magical realms of sleep and on the elliptical.

In-between snippets of Frida and other movies I'd never seen, I painted my apartment gallery white, imagining the sketches I will draw to decorate the walls. 

For some reason, after so many thousands of words, I've begun to crave an exploration into visual art. 

I want gray ink and gray pencil to draw on bright white paper to see what else is rattling inside this brain. 

It is a sleepy afternoon in Manhattan with the faraway sound of ambulance and cart and child and honk and squeak from a faulty faucett. 

Writing, being and somethingness

Odilia Rivera-Santos

I had no coffee today and felt the clean lethargy of withdrawal but it was minor, not the cataclysmic migraine some people get. My body can easily acclimate to change as long as it's not weather-related. Writing is something best done with a hot beverage in hand though.

Kukicha tea was a substitute for a while and then, green tea and Postum, which tasted like melted brown crayons.

It is still novel-writing month and I had my normal bout of belligerence with the thought of writing one in November, not because it is a one-month assignment or because it's November, but because I have to wrestle like a crocodile at the conformity aspect or the footballness of it -- a team sport with plenty of head injuries. 

Writing is about the love, not the vain glory or pain... I think. And sometimes, there is a little bit of solace and therapy in creating art as well and having the guts to call one's own work art. It's a pretty word although it rhymes with an inelegant one. 

I guess today is a day to write as if no one is reading.
















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Work, Life, Writerly Life, and New Year's Resolutions

by Odilia Rivera Santos

Years ago, I picked up a book entitled The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It was a book for creatives to help make us more productive and Cameron included various exercises and one strange suggestion for writers: stop reading.
Instead of stopping reading altogether, I stopped reading The Artist's Way. The suggestion of morning pages was a good one -- the author suggests writing three pages every morning. I could easily write 50 every morning, so limiting a freewrite to 3 was intriguing. The images were more vibrant and events dramatic in the condensed version, which felt like having bouillon cubes in the cupboard. I could always return to my literary bouillon, drop one in a pot of dilution material -- dialogue, setting, pauses, esoteric phrases, etc.
I published quite a few poems, nonfiction and some fiction from my morning pages. The not reading part always seemed daunting. I have always read novels, nutrition, philosophy, psychology, and poetry as if my life depended on it.
A friend today mentioned that sometimes a lonely act such as writing can use company, specifically the company of other writers.
Writing is always a liberating experience for me and it is the one constant. Regardless of my gypsy-like existence in which I appear to always be comfortable with the thought of immigrating to a foreign land or borough, writing is a nourishing constant. Without writing, I am at a loss for words and range of emotion in civilian life. My maturity and confidence in the creative realm leaves other realms in the dust.
I am most alive, relaxed, excited, happy, at ease, and happy with myself when I have made adequate room to write and get ideas out into the world.

One of my new year's resolutions is to start my new year's resolutions early.
Resolution #1: I will read only on Fridays. Ouch!
Resolution #2: I will work collaboratively with other writers.

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The orgiastic pleasures of writing . . . yeah, it's awesome

Odilia Rivera Santos

I am so content to sit in my bed propped up by pillows with my Mac on my lap I forget to eat and sometimes go hours with only water and coffee. I know this is not physically healthy, so I force myself to get up and prepare good snacks, which don't require my full focus. It is a great feeling to listen to the news or interviews with writers or artists. Today, I got up early, posted on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and prepared a runner's breakfast of one slice of bread with crunchy peanut butter and coffee with milk. I headed out for a run and took a long leisurely walk by the river. I felt a bit restless but fought the temptation to get a book at the library to read under a tree. Life is about balance after all. I wanted to use other senses and go on an intellectual fast or put my intellectual mind on a modified fast at least. I thought, perhaps, the intuition suffers if one keeps intellectual parts of the brain too overworked.
I walked around Harlem and saw the door to The Cotton Club was ajar, so I stuck my head in and asked if I could look around. The well-dressed man behind a desk waved me in and I entered, knowing I had been there before but not quite remembering the particulars. Glistening red chairs and small tables point to the fact that the place is for performance and you can imagine an elegant Black audience sipping drinks in semi-darkness as light reflects from sparkling contented eyes - the stuff mundane life aspires to. There's magic in this small space and you can feel it. The man who welcomed me in is the owner, John Beatty and he spoke to me about his Columbia University experience. CU is trying to turn Harlem into an extension of its campus: predominately white and privileged. Mr. Beatty held his ground and CU backed off. Black History takes precedence over corporate greed for once. Mr Beatty said Monday night is the night to drop by.
I had an epiphany about time -- yes, another one. It is ok to change your deadlines if you feel it is best and not everything must be accomplished at a maddening breakneck speed.
I am sitting by the river in the bright sunshine, sunning myself while a beautiful exotic yellow and blue birds screeches from the bridge. It may be someone's very expensive pet and, for a moment, I consider calling 311. But then, I changed my mind because exotic birds should be free. Perched unceremoniously on the bridge, she seems content and does she not have the right to be free?

. . . you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
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Rituals for Writing a New Novel

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

I have been toying with the idea of writing the definitive codependent relationship novel for a couple of years, and finally, the time seems perfect to dive into the abyss. The main characters will chase crazy down a crazy rabbit hole and undergo a transmogrification to put Mary Shelly to shame. I am writing the character dossiers tonight and unpacking their brains in the morning: the neurosis of past events, childhoods, relationships and betrayals will be lain across a cloth on a table like the remains of a crime scene. The tone for this novel will be very conversational, unlike the novel I completed in June of 2011 -- which was very formal and contained an epistolary section. This novel will be imagery punctuated with the words of two people who are seeking salvation in the wrong place, in the wrong ways, and with the wrong person. Their conversations will delve into what I call the suffering olympics. The suffering olympics is a special competition in which people don't listen to each because they are too busy telling their story over and over again. It is a comedy, even though it sounds a little heavy duty. I think there is comedy in the search for a love approximating one's first love, which I believe romance really is all about. How do you, as an adult, recreate the feeling of being safe, fed, protected and wearing a dry diaper?
I enjoy creating deadlines for myself and hope you will keep me company during the writing of this novel. The novel will be completed on July 31st, and I will do a public reading. Please stay tuned and feel free to ask questions about where my characters are and what they're doing.
My rituals for writing a new novel include lots of bottles of water in the fridge, long walks or runs to sort out the thousands of details flooding in, meditation, a daily word count goal, and lots of dancing. I need music and movement as a balance to sitting still for hours per day.

I will keep you posted on what happens with the two novels currently floating in the ether.

Blogging -- Subject Matters

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

When I ventured to blog, there was the clear idea of having an audience. Instead of keeping a journal with story sketches or the happenings of my day, I could now obsessively post in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia or instead of running down the subway stairs to go hobnob with other nerdy artsy types. This is not to say blogging replaces socializing with humans, because I love the humans, but it is nice to have a medium through which people can see what I do. I am a writer, and this fact shapes my approach to most things in life. Thoughts of fame and fortune are never far behind in American culture, but for me, fame is irrelevant -- just the fortune will do. We write because we love writing, and I suspect most of us, bloggers, consider the possibility of hitting the blogger lottery: getting paid to blog. The new American dream for those of us comfortable with the idea of a screen in front of our faces all day is the ability to earn a living in a strange outfit while sitting in a French coffee shop, eating croissants and drinking a capuchino.
Before I began this blogging journey in 2008, I thought about topics that might gain a following, so I surfed the net with an eye on numbers; it seemed sites devoted to porn and beauty tips were very popular. This was just what I gleaned from a cursory glance. I wasn't particularly qualified to write on either subject. I did, however, start to wonder what the two subjects might have in common. Lip gloss and coitus infinitus were inextricably bound. I wondered if the attraction to these sites could be a need for self-improvement, a need to cover all the bases as dating becomes a permanent fixture in people's lives; if one could both apply makeup and learn all the latest techniques for having sex, ...
An advertisement popped up the other day for a dating site for older people. The people in the pictures looked to be in their early eighties, and I wondered what people were hoping to find in this dating from junior high school to grave culture. It is okay to settle down with one person and watch him or her lose the sparkling appeal and then, perhaps, the ability to think rationally. There should be phases of a relationship in which two people are partners and then, one needs more help than the other. I wondered if people let go of each other too easily in a relationship. Of course, I am not speaking of cases in which there is possessive, jealous or otherwise unacceptable behavior. But I did wonder about the kind of baggage people drag around from one relationship to another.
It is still odd for me to hear of someone's parents being divorced. My parents got married and their marriage was dissolved as they'd promised it would be: through death. My father died after he and my mother had been together for over sixty years. They settled in and settled for that on which they'd agreed. Their agreement including sickness, as my father became ill at a relatively young age and never quite recovered. It is an old-fashioned idea to be with one person and allow him or her to annoy without even considering walking away. The love is decided and the love question is never again brought up. It just is.

Thinking about porn and makeup, I came to the conclusion -- no pun intended, that people just don't know how to settle anymore or settle down. And perhaps, there are areas in life in which being complacent would be a good thing or at least preferable to the alternative. I have settled down with writing and we are definitely staying together through sickness, health, rich, poor and all the other issues that may come up. I will write and observe, feeling a sense of satisfied complacence. Yes, I have settled and have no problem with it.



Writing on Writing
My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

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