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.

Morning Psychography

I have been writing morning pages every day for years and after a couple of weeks or months of writing accumulates, I do a quick scan and see if there is anything that could be transformed into readable text. I pick through, find words or sentences that flow well and save them for later and the rest goes in the recycling bin. A morning freewrite unencumbered by purpose, lets ideas breathe and some poems and stories have emerged. From freedom to structure is a process I enjoy. It feels good to know each word isn't precious and is just a mental warm-up or purge if I have been particularly challenged by something or someone. A quiet rage on the page is a rare event, but happens sometimes.
The guideline for those morning pages is to write quickly as a way to kick up what might be hidden from my consciousness but bubbling to the surface in one way or another.
And I focus on balance - keep it light on complaints and heavy on the gratitude.

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.’

Writing a novel by hand... how novel! by Odilia Rivera-Santos

I started a new novel or novela and will write the whole thing by hand. There is something about pen and paper early in the morning that jives with the sinews of my brain and the brawn of my intellect. It is 4:30 in the morning and the swish of traffic is sluggish and not as oceanic as it gets at around six, the small lamps are on illuminating bits of wall here and there, and the drip of the faucett -- which seems to be like the building passing gas -- is steady. I get up to tweak it and make the drip stop, it stops, I sit and it starts, another building fart.

The coffee is here to my right and a new collage devoted to ambition, stakes its claim, stares back at me, and tells my mind to write something commercial... no more La Diana-inspired ephemera, no birds'nests of urban blight.

Although birds'nest, urban blight, pastoral novels and fantasy are at the tip of my tongue. No, I resist the un-being of me. And I wrestle with ambition and pin it to the linoleum floor. The novel is being written in the wee and I'm good. Be-ware peaks and valleys and surprises and ellipsis to fill in spaces for yourself for your own self. 

Right now, I am feeling the cool breeze between my toes from the terrace. And the novel?

There are two women named María, one Mexican and one Puerto Rican to be played by a Mexican and a Puerto Rican in the film, and there is an elderly Chinese lesbian, an alcoholic super/carpenter/electrician, and the Jewish surrogate grandmother of course. It is set in New York City. 

I will be reading from this new novel, new poetry and new short stories at Uptown Roasters on September 27th from 3 to 6 along with some other very talented women writers/performers

Uptown Roasters

135 East 110th St between Park and Lexington Ave

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. 

Transnationalism for Dummies by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Writings on colonialism, being hemmed in and let out, sensualist excursions from Puerto Rico, the island of my birth, to the concrete silent, gray, black and white world of the mainland.

Brincando el charco.

Leaving Puerto Rican

Playing social worker

Being and being nothing and becoming someone unrecognizable.

Poetry

Stories

Art scrawled on walls.

I will be doing a tiny poetry reading in January

Www.nycpoorbutcool.blogspot.com

Www.fashionloveandneuroscience.blogspot.com

Www.howardsendinnewyork.blogspot.com

Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

by Odilia Rivera-Santos

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Subject: Invite me!

Cantaahora at yahoo.com

Expanding your horizons and letting go of old attachments

Odilia Rivera-Santos

Any artist will tell you that making art requires sacrifice and focus. Regardless of your personal difficulties -- romantic, financial, hunger or any other sort of deprivation -- you make art.

Every day presents an opportunity to balance myriad interests, earn money from the 100 or so jobs you are well-trained to perform and make a little something. Creating something from your imagination, solitary-ness and the expertly honed nervous energy rushing through your veins is a thrilling sensation.

A week ago, I realized some of my attachments were eclipsing my performance as Writer and Creator. 

I let go of the attachments, which blocked my progress and feel freer.

In other words, I'm willing to relocate to a place more hospitable to creative types and willing to do so in whatever way the opportunity presents itself, without fear or hesitation.

The axiom -- or was it a rallying cry? -- of my teenage years is fitting for this revelation ... Fuck it!

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.
















 Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

10/31/12 Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC writer by Odilia Rivera-Santos

The hurricane is one of those occasions on which you can say "If you want to make God laugh, make plans." Whatever plans we all had for this week -- no matter how intricately choreographed -- have now been rerouted like traffic on a major highway during construction.
I guess we can say all of life is a highway under construction with detours and unexpected potholes and someone hopping out when you least expect it with an orange flag waving to slow or halt your 'progress.'

Progress is one of those things we constantly choose to pin down and measure the way researchers trap dangerous animals in the wild, drug them and measure them to see how climate change affects the fertility rate of an alligator for instance.

How does an artist measure progress?
Perhaps, the true measure of success as an artist is receiving frequent paychecks for one's work or accolades or gaining a big following on Twitter. We could also say the true measure of success as an artist is praise and not being understood within one's lifetime and whiling away the hours, months, years as a clerk, copying data from one oversized notebook to another like Kafka did.

Gratitude is something worth expressing on a daily basis. Having achieved at least part of one's aims in life may be enough. .. just a thought to ponder for those who rejoice or tinker with the thought of suicide at not getting exactly what they want. There is something especially petulant and childish -- in an unappealing way about those who refuse to try something different when the old methods no longer produce desired results. Life is about experimentation and desperation is for children. Children have no means of escape from uncomfortable or undesirable situations, but most adults in the United States do.

National Novel-Writing Month 

And on the experimentation front, I have decided to write the worst novel ever written since the lovely esoteric ones remain unpublished and I still haven't felt compelled to self-publish them -- something I am ninety-eight percent sure I will do.

Here is a bit of my novel

The edge of the river

The two women walk side by side down the dark street leading to the railroad, not knowing what to say next as they digest the idea of being related through a philandering father. María looks at her sister's glistening black braid leading down her back and thinks how it reminds her of the Evangelists in the family and her schoolgirl years -- obeying her mother's endless rules about how a proper Christian girl should behave.


Let's walk down this street ... it's a little bit better lit. It's spooky around here.

You just don't feel comfortable in a small town. This is the way it is after seven at night -- people come home from work and go inside to warm up by the heat of the TV. Look over here! We walked in this area when we were very little. I remember how the road curved here and those stone walls near the maple trees. Do you remember, M?

Not really. 

Well, you were about four when our moms stopped hanging out. .. maybe, that's when they figured out what papi had done. Dating best friends has got to be some kind of sin and that's not a word I use lightly, or at all, really. 

We can't only blame him; our mothers kept the secret too. It's always amazing to think of the worlds people carry around, their secrets, and motivations only they understand.

Maybe, they were just horny bitches and he was a good lay... ever think of that?

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.

http://artistswayatwork.com/aw.html

9.27.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Riding the train from one end of the 2 line to another, you see a little bit of everything: Haitian church goers, Hassidum, Wall Street executives and protesters following their footsteps, young families headed to the lesser known nooks and crannies of Bronx neighborhoods and me.

As I sit peacefully thinking about what best to do with the hundreds of pages of writing I've accumulated, I glance to my left and notice a woman immersed in a book. I think of how many bits of information her brain must ignore to accomplish the task of following a plot.
I return to the New York Times to read an article about drug cartels and their control of a town and extortion plots and I imagine many must consider legalization of drugs to be the best option.
There would be a transition period while drug dealers get used to wearing suits and not carrying a gun while they visit hospitals, buying hospital staff monthly lunches to insure when a sluggish patient needs a crack sample, the grateful workers will reach for their brand of crack.

I fold the paper neatly to peruse later. And wait for the show.
On the train, there's always a show.
A Chinese woman walks into the car, pushing a cart. She plops herself down between between reader and writer.
We look up and make eye-contact, above the head of the Chinese lady, like synchronized swimmers.
The Chinese woman fidgets and lunges at the map and sits down again all the while exuding a diversity of funk heretofore unknown to man.
But you can't make assumptions.
She might be completely sane and have no sense of smell or she may have ingested some herbal medicines, which can make one smell like a donkey for a couple of hours or she might have some physical malady.

We, reader and writer, stand, again synchronized, and bemoan our seatless state during a non-rush hour rush hour.
The Chinese woman, her mission accomplished, unpacks some things from her cart and luxuriates, having inherited a whole subway bench to herself -- a rare event in a city where size 24 often crams into size 6 slots.

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9.15.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer, Odilia Rivera Santos

Odilia Rivera Santos

I am sitting in Starbucks, the one with women who seemed to have leapt from my ghetto Jane Austen musical, which I've written in my head. I was thinking about my limitations the other day and realized speaking of minutiae is difficult, although a friend attempted to teach me once. My office mate at that corporate university was a master at speaking of minutiae; she swam between words to psychoanalyze people and after an avalanche of seemingly meaningless talk, she would causally cut through the shit and ask sledgehammer questions: Does your husband hit you?
Silence, except for me typing away in an attempt to pretend I was not eavesdropping.
Silence and tears.
Silence and then, a confession.
I think it helped my office-mate friend had been an NYPD cop and almost made detective. She continued to detective in her quotidian existence as the holder of everyone's secrets and gatekeeper for absent-minded intellectuals, academics and physicians. She noticed everything.
I did pick up some pointers from her, learning to chitchat in short spurts and run away, and it was a revelation. But my mind does naturally swim toward bigger questions about human potential and motivation and how to make words read like a good French pastry tastes and crumbles.
Today, I am writing lines for characters whose parts I collected in the past week and writing poetry. I am not holding the words tightly.
Words should fall delicately away, leaving only a faint memory to be covered up with clumsy experiences.


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A slim volume of Puerto Rican-flavored Creative Nonfiction. Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

8.29.11 Blip journal: the progress of a NYC writer

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

Odilia Rivera Santos is a writer, performer, editor, creative writing teacher and translator.

I have never fancied myself as any kind of therapist or counselor -- just an observer of human interactions and motivation. Observation, interaction, meditation, solitude and reflection are all necessary in my experience as a writer. In order to write well, you have to pay attention to details, but you have to know what to do with the details you've collected.
One of the most interesting kind of humans to observe is the chaos maker; everyone knows one and my advice is be careful who you let in your life. Facebook provides a good opportunity to meditate on this idea: some people should be on the fan page, not the friend page if you get my drift.

I wrote an essay entitled Chaos Makers, for my e-book Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I ,about people who lack clarity and fear being alone. Chaos makers create drama from the simplest incident, and in paranoiac conversations, they obsess about how others view them.
They tend to lack focus and ramble on at a rapid pace, mainly about trivial things.
I've observed that the chaos maker doesn't edit or filter and sees their perceptions as fact even if he/she has no evidence to bolster said perception. Chaos makers spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing other people's behavior or their interactions with other people instead of just asking a question. They often say I think she thinks. Instead of asking a person what he or she thinks, the chaos maker will spend days speculating about a sentence someone uttered.
And if you ask How was your day?, you will get a list of everything the cm did: I got up at 6, drank coffee, talked to my uncle about his liver surgery, took a shower with this new strawberry bodywash I got at the 99 cent store -- it's really good though!, I walked from Brooklyn to the East Village, I. . .
The chaos maker pays attention to details but becomes completely lost in the details, unable to use them toward a coherent purpose. I recently dealt with a chaos maker who considered himself a kind of Sherlock Holmes; he did compile details but lacked the logic necessary to come to a reasonable conclusion. His impressive collection of details led to a paranoiac conclusion.

A little disorder in life or work in the manufacturing of disorder

While every one of us has a area of life in which there is a little disorder, the chaos maker is a disorder and disorganization factory, creating complications from the simplest elements.
I think CMs are popular at parties and get-togethers because they can flit from one group to another, dropping a strange amusing anecdote, and in small doses, they are entertaining. Trying to have in-depth conversations is impossible because they lack focus; their speech is more a series of bullet points.

Goodbye to all that

I made a conscious decision to distance myself from CMs because their shenanigans take time from my peaceful reading and writing time. If we read about our favorite authors' lives, we find dysfunctional tumultuous periods, but they were still able to produce magnificent work worthy of discussion due to a sharpened clear focus, and the wonderful thing is their work sits quietly on a bookshelf -- slivers of brilliance, perhaps garnered through horrific desperate experiences, without burdening the reader with a phone call at 3am.
I spent many years as the person people called in an emergency, and one day, I was on the phone with a friend who was repeating her problem over and over again, and I found myself rolling my eyes. This was a person who never asked me how I was or if everything was okay with me.
I realized on that day I no longer gleaned anything from this kind of exchange. A friend of mine said it is the difference between having someone in your life who is a 'client' and someone who is an 'equal.'
This particular friend was not an equal; she was a client who wasn't paying me, nor did she even offer to treat me to dinner after six years of my being her go-to person for every issue in her life. When I called her and needed her support, she was unavailable. I stopped talking to her, realizing in her mind, it was akin to her psychologist calling her to state a problem. A breach of professionalism. Client.

Traditional-Puerto-Rican-Woman Training

Being a caretaker was part of my training as a Puerto Rican girl growing up in a very traditional Puerto Rican family from Puerto Rico, which is very different from the hipsters born and raised on the mainland. A good Puerto Rican woman was one who took care of others and made herself invisible and continued to excise her dreams and desires from her own life to prove her fealty to the 'correct' model of womanhood.
I finally decided to refer troubled souls to 'professionals.'
It was a liberating decision.
I liberated myself from the last remnant of Puerto Rican Woman training.
I can tell people I don't have time to listen to the same problem ten times, because it isn't a good use of my time, I'm not getting paid to do this, and focusing on problems instead of solutions is a waste of time.
People raised to be caretakers often need to be reminded to take care of themselves.
http://peopleforpuertorico.blogspot.com/2011/04/caretakersactivists-love-thyself.html

Work and Life

When I worked with victims of domestic violence and homeless people, I noticed they had a thousand details for each story. As they told their stories, I could see the pain and anxiety rise and realized it was not only unhealthy to focus so much on one's problems, without reflection, but dangerous. Many had suffered multiple breakdowns and the clients kept bringing themselves to the edge by retelling their story to as many people as possible.
I taught the clients at the agency to state the problem in one sentence without providing a life history. I then had them write their autobiographies in seven year intervals as well as everything that was bothering them on a piece of paper, and I would ask which details they needed to share and with whom. Their lives had been full of tragedy and I asked them to reflect on each with one question in mind: What did you learn from this experience at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one?
I noticed their anxiety level went down and they became more rational in their exchanges with me and others. I enjoyed my work and when it was time to move on from that line of work, I did. Now, it's time for me to be very careful with the persons I allow into my life.

Self-destructive people want to take you with them
Self-destructive people make for great theater, but in life, they are very time-consuming and emotionally exhausting. They threaten to destroy your sanctuary and rob you of the little bit of sanity you have left. I have dated chaos makers and had them as 'friends,' so I have dedicated enough time to chaos makers in my life; now, I decide how and when to interact with CMs.
If you know how to be well and you choose to do things to make yourself sick, I don't need you in my life.

Writing is my homeboy

I am happiest when working at my own pace, which leads me back to the wonderful solitary activity of writing. I don't need to go to meetings or confer with anyone or wait until someone else resolves fifty problems before they can meet a deadline. I write regardless of my circumstances, with or without a computer, with or without tranquil surroundings, and make no excuses. If I don't do something within a particular timeframe for myself, it affects only me.
Today is a perfect day. I am reading, writing, listening to the news and minding my own business and leaving others to theirs.

If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.
Dalai Lama

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.

Being and Being Productive as a Writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

One of the complaints I hear a lot from other writers is that they don’t have time to write.
It isn’t a question of time, but motivation. Some of my favorite writers have written books in between chopping rocks in a gulag and a meal of gruel. Every productive writer has his or her own method for remaining constant as far as a writing schedule is concerned.
When I was teaching in an adult education program full-time, nine to five, and teaching part-time in the evenings, six to nine, I still managed to write for hours every day. I would write in the morning, during my lunch break, and during my commute to and from the day job to the night job. By the end of the day, I had completed poems, outlines for stories or novels or some essays to post on my blogs.
Sometimes, writers are looking for an ideal situation -- some Hemingway-esque cabin in Cuba with a hammock on the porch. But what really matters for an artist is to stay productive and to always seek ways of challenging ourselves to avoid getting in a rut. And the definition of ‘productive’ can vary; there can be flexibility in one’s view of productivity. I occasionally abandon the written word and spend time observing people or go to museums to visit art. Switching from the literary to visual has a way of dislodging me from any feeling of routine when I need to abandon routines, as useful as they are.
I took a break from submitting my work to journals in 2006 and just wrote.
Prior to this self-imposed submission break, I had done well getting my work in journals I respected, but I wanted time to develop long-term ideas and concepts without the interruption of an arbitrary deadline. In 2008, I decided to start a blog with the idea its subject matter would be intentionally unclear. I allowed myself to think on this site with very few visits until my aim came into focus. In the last five years, I have written plays, screenplays, short stories, hundreds of poems, hundreds of blog posts, and a novel of which I am proud. I began to submit work to journals again last year, but my relationship with faceless editors who choose whether to publish my work has changed. I always had an independent streak and realized both teaching and writing offered a modicum of autonomy, which I found very satisfying.
I give myself assignments in order to keep my productivity flowing.
Recently, I decided to organize some poetry readings; one reading was erotic poetry and prose and the other was on Puerto Rican identity, history and place, so I gave myself an assignment: write thirty pages of new material for each reading. I met my goal and now have a twenty-five-page manuscript, covering our migration from an island to the South Bronx, taking a trip to Cuba -- which was important because the culture was so similar to that of Puerto Rico when I was a child, and class issues. I am submitting the manuscript to a Latino journal today. The erotica collection will find a home as well.
There is something to be said for structure for any kind of goal one may have.

WRITERLY PRACTICES
I give myself assignments and find this is the most efficient way to get ideas to flow. It appears the brain is quite adept at organizing information once there is a clear purpose. I wrote 365 poems on the subject of love for my poetry blog, 150 pages of autobiographical essays and even did some artist interviews as a means of keeping my writing interesting.
Socializing is important because we humans are social animals, but writing is a solitary practice, unless your plan is to write for a television show in which case, you would be sitting in a room with a bunch of people. Together, as you eat bear claws and drink designer coffee, you would build a show line by line, joke by joke, etc.
Regular non-collaborative writing can be very challenging for very social people.
Some people need applause and constant attention. I don’t. I love solitude.
Even though I love being alone, sometimes, I crave solitude with company and go to a coffee shop in order to be surrounded by people. I may be completely absorbed in my work and looking only at the computer screen but part of my brain enjoys a little ambient noise. I rarely write in silence. There is either music or someone talking while I write.
I go online and download podcasts on a variety of subjects. Podcasts allow me to ‘read’ while I write. I listen to programs in Spanish, French and English and also download lectures on subjects I wish to study. The life of a writer requires constant intellectual challenge so as to be able to write for a variety of audiences and to create multi-dimensional characters. Linguistic pliability doesn’t come in a pill or through osmosis. As I am writing this, I am downloading podcasts in French and some London Business School of Entrepreneurship lectures. After all, to write about something, you have to know something.

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My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writing Ruminations while on Henry Miller

@20ll Odilia Rivera Santos

I read Henry Miller for the first time in junior high school. I was probably thirteen years old. Because my parents didn't speak English, I had to make a lot of their decisions for them; one of the decisions I made for my mother was signing that little library slip asking if a child can take books from any part of the library or only the children's section.
I, as a fourth grader, felt it would be an outrage to have someone dictate to ME what I could and could not read, so I told my mother to sign the all-permission, take-out-any-kind-of-crazy-ass book slip.
Firme aquí
She nodded, as she always did, signed the paper and this is how I ended up reading Delta of Venus and Anäis Nin's journals at 13. Nin was the go-between who took me to Miller.
When I love a particular writer, I read writers they liked. One book would lead me to ten other books and I was always thankful for summer so I could read without the nussiance of stupid elementary school homework assignments.

The only drug I use or abuse is caffeine; I figure if Keith Richards is almost seventy and still alive and performing and his mind seems relatively intact, I can drink a couple of cups of coffee a day.

Before coffee, Henry Miller was my drug.
His exuberance and love of life was something I admired and his pessimism seemed a bit of an affectation, not real. It was Henry Miller who led me to Louis Ferdinand Céline and Journey to the End of the Night. I found Céline's morbid humor very Puerto Rican. I read Journey when I was nineteen, and it is still one of my favorite books of all time; I sat at a coffee shop in the East Village, drinking coffee and laughing with the book as if I had been sitting with an old friend. My old friend Céline had been dust for a long time but still so alive in this work.

I read The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus,Plexus, and Nexus, The Tropic of Cancer, The Tropic of Capricorn one after another with an understanding that his works were not pure autobiography or merely a description of quotidian life. He was in the process of a series of incarnations, in which philosophizing played a great part, and Miller describes his transformation process with humor, pathos and cruelty.
He was inventing himself and allowing an audience to watch; it is a courageous act to say, as a child, you wanted to be an artist and be free of the societal expectations of family, financial stability and routine. His desire to become an artist was audacious to say the least because he expressed doubt in his own abilities and he lived in a time at which choosing the life of an artist was considered bizarre.
Miller admired visionaries and his parents were conformists.
I guess many visionaries stand on the shoulders of conformists -- somebody has to pay for dinner, right?
Miller's parents were not artists and he dreamt of a life surrounded by artists.
I admired his fight to break free of the norm and the yoke of modernity. As a child, I also thought of being an artist and of serving my art all day long -- going to lectures and performances, taking long walks in the park and hanging out all night in a café in Paris in 1930, when it was so cheap to live there. I needed a time machine though.
Like Miller, I thought of how foreign my choice of vocation was to that of my parents. My mother made pasteles and my father was a carpenter and they both had an elementary school education. One big difference between Miller's parents and mine was that my mother and father loved music and film. My mother sat me down when I was very young to watch Jorge Negrete and Laurence Olivier so I would know what a great artist looked like.

Miller had to create himself from the ground up, following his own dictum: "a man has to save himself."
I believe we arrive in this world with a spark in which lies our true vocation or purpose and through the tedium of all the trouble we get into when we choose the wrong paths, it is dimmed. We are able to find our way back to a correct path through conscious effort and everything else is the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Every time I find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, I think that it is like a visit to The Salvation Army Thrift Store - if you look closely enough, you'll find something worthwhile but if you daydream your way through not only will you not get anything worthwhile, but someone might just pickpocket your ass.
Like Miller, I have found myself doing a lot of jobs, which made no sense whatsoever. When I was a teenager, I worked at the wallet counter at Macy's near the entrance of the store. They hired me without filling out a job application or references because they wanted a pretty girl by the door, but they soon discovered I had some very un-pretty girl-like behavior -- such as leaning on the counter to read The Decameron and biting my nails. I also did my share of telemarketing with a gang of unemployed actors, angry retired ballet dancers, alcoholic writers, and stand-up comedians in-between gigs. I did surveys on everything from cat litter to the Hollywood movies. I used to do a lot of writing at the telemarketing jobs for which I was admonished on a regular basis.

This morning, I have been listening to a series of 1956 interviews with Miller conducted by his friend Ben Grauer. In part 3 of the interview, Miller speaks about how he could never do anything for a buck just to stay alive. He advocates going to the edge and says artists don't really starve in the U.S. He spent a year writing letters to people in which he asked for anything they could offer: money, shoes, clothes. In exchange for donations, he sent people a watercolor painting. Miller was also a painter.
He went out in the streets and begged in Brooklyn instead of taking work he found demeaning such as advertising. But he found begging to be as difficult as a day job.
Although he questioned his artistic ability, he was clear being an artist was the only thing he wanted to do and this was after a long list of jobs.
He experimented with being a regular guy with a wife, a child and a job as a manager at a messenger company, which had originally turned him down for a job as a messenger -- what Miller calls the lowest job possible. He met a woman who encouraged him to quit the job and write full-time.
I know.
Women are awesome.
This messenger job was his last regular job and it was at that point, he vowed to never return to regular work and just write.
After ten years of suffering, his first book was published.
He speaks of survival as the essential aspect of being an artist. We, as artists, work on producing work others may not appreciate until we're dead. In that way, I would consider artists similar to scientists. Sometimes, art, like science, is a continuum in which building upon work already finished long ago will bring forth the greatness of ideas by some unknown personage. In a a scientific continuum, I imagine the aim would be to cure cancer and in an artistic continuum, we might aim to cure mediocrity.

“We prefer a kind of senseless insect activity to a genuine activity which may often be new activity -- inaction do you see? I don’t say to be quiet to do nothing. I don’t say that at all but I say it should have sense -- it should have meaning what we do everyday and the greater part of what we do everyday has damn little meaning” - HM

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My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Why do you need a blog? By Odilia Rivera-Santos

©2011 by Odilia Rivera-Santos


One of the best reasons to have a blog is to connect with people and you must pick a topic you live and breathe, otherwise, your posts will be too infrequent to matter. I have chosen to focus only on writing on this blog, as being an author is my primary source of spiritual, intellectual and creative joy.
For those who would like to be writers, one of the simplest pieces of advice I can give is to create a reading and writing schedule. Sometimes, people say they are too busy to read; President Obama reads. I think he's really busy.
Nothing can replace a breadth of knowledge in topics that really matter to you.
If you are a poet, studying poets will enhance your poetic skills even if you spell skills with a "z." Variety makes your personal statement as an artist more interesting and universal. Most of us seek to connect with people outside our immediate circle.
As a writer, I don't only want Afro-Puerto-Rican-born-in-Puerto Rico-raised-in-the-Bronx-educated-at-a-fancy-college-with-a-degree-in-comparative-literature-and-a minor-in-creative writing-published-in-fancy-journals-only-fancy-professors-read-whose-father-worked-in-the-sugarcane-fields-with-parents-who-had-an-elementary-school-education-translating-researching-poets-novelists-reading my work. That would be boring.
I love variety in my reading and in my readers; it's nice to know people in Australia and Spain read my work and one woman who sent me an email didn't know what Puerto Rico was.

AUTODIDACT OR FORMAL EDUCATION?
I am an autodidact with a formal education and feel both are equally important. One thing we've lost in our strive for individualism, in the U.S., is respect for mentorship. I had wonderful literature and poetry professors who were very talented writers as well. Having a person who has studied Cervantes for thirty years to facilitate a discussion of his work is valuable and the professor learns from students. The neophyte presents a fresh perspective to add to the professor's primary source file. I am a proponent of taking writing and literature classes or being part of an organized group in which there is structure, assignments, regular attendance, etc.

The Informalities

Observing daily life is wonderful but there is no background story to fill in the blanks; we can observe certain habits of ethnic groups with whom we are unfamiliar but not know the roots of certain patterns. As a writer, I always research anything I find interesting without thinking of a specific way to apply new knowledge. I do research on a new topic and the information finds itself into my writing. Characters have more depth if the writer does not just write details in a perfunctory manner and the character's thought processes, speech patterns and trajectory will be more authentic with some background knowledge.

Who are you in the writer spectrum?

Loner - unarmed -- I hope, joiner, tangential participant

There are certain aspects of writing that are negotiable; for example, some people love writing groups and choose to write in groups for years and some people, find an occasional writing workshop to be very useful.
I could not be a lifer in a writing group but have found writing workshops very useful.
I consider writing workshops to be akin to therapy.
The first couple of therapy sessions are intense and frequent until you cough up the emotional hairballs. After those initial sessions or months of sessions, depending on your situation, the therapy customer reaches emotional stasis and returns to therapy sessions for the occasional tuneup.
This is how workshops work for me; I like writing workshops for the occasional creativity tuneup -- to see my ideas connecting with others and to enjoy the spontaneity of writing exercises in front of strangers.
I did hard time in creative writing workshops for two years in college and found it extremely useful for internalizing my editor.

What is the role of an editor?
In my humble opinion, a great editor reads and asks questions and a terrible editor makes changes.