Ash Wednesday March 25, 2011

My relationship with writing is an ever changing one. As generic as this may sound I have always wanted to write and there are notebooks with the stories I would dictate to my mother when I was a child. I think I even won a couple of school contests but then I stopped writing.
In BU I knew I wanted to get back into the writing world but I felt mortified at the notion of being a journalist. I didn’t trust myself to be able to follow inverted pyramids, Chicago styles or to be 100% objective (who is?) and so decided to go into screenwriting. Those two years of screenplays were fantastic – I wrote about my maternal grandparent’s love story, I adapted Gioconda Belli’s wonderful novel Waslala and some other stuff I don’t even remember. My teachers Kae and Stephen Geller were complete geniuses and I owe everything I know about characters to them.
The day before my graduation I heard that 90% of screenwriters were unemployed and really wished someone had told me that before, not that I would studied anything else.
I moved to South Africa, that’s where home was at the time, and hoped for a sabbatical. My mother had other plans and sent me to work at the Information Ministry three weeks after I arrived. I entered the world of television, which I of course considered a lesser medium than film, with the confidence only a 22 year can have. At Lesotho Television I learned about production, editing, content, and imagination. We had to create something from nothing and I had a blast. At the peak of my shortly and extra successful career at LTV my parents retired and were headed back to Venezuela. I moved to Miami certain that I would find a job as a T.V. producer for a Spanish speaking channel broadcasting to Latin America. I did.
By this point writing was in the back burner. I got married. Had a kid. Changed jobs. Tried to be a copywriter (and that certainly didn’t work) and about a year and a half ago got the never to call Marcela Landres a NY editor. That conversation changed me, she was very honest, helpful and full of advise. Her best ones? Take classes and get a writing group.
As Marcela suggested I looked into UCLA Extension and enrolled in a non-fiction class. I was petrified. The inner critic in me is of gigantic proportions. Jose and Joel, my coworkers, had to read through essays every week and I would question and question – waiting to hear how much I sucked. What can I say? They were kind in their comments and their support. I finished 2009 happy that I had found writing again and wanting to go at it like there was no tomorrow.

The beginning of last year found me taking an Intro to Fiction class. The last assignment for the class was to turn in a short story. My procrastination kicked in the deadline was fast approaching and I was still story-less. The only sane choice at the time was to expand on one of the exercises I had turned in earlier in the quarter, one about a middle aged couple who (yes, you guessed it) hate each other. It was all quite simple really, she was having breakfast, he came back from the doctor to give her the sad news of his impending death. She is thrilled.
I began to expand on my 300 word exercise on Ash Wednesday of last year and decided – for good luck and because I had no idea where it was going I decided to give the story that name. Then things got a bit more complicated than I had initially planned. My characters didn’t like their names, the wife didn’t want to be just a house wife, the husband did not want to be evil and their daughter kept on popping up and refused to go away. I walked around with them all day as it was impossible to get them out of my head.
Turns out my short story was a bit more complex than expected and through the suggestion of one of my class mates I signed up for UCLA Extension’s Novel I with the super talented Jessica Barksdale Inclan.
The idea was to flesh out the story into a novel. And let me stop here to say that I am still at awe of the word novel and have to pinch myself over and over again to see if its real and the 99 pages I turned in yesterday as my last homework for Novel III say it is. However this quarter I have struggled to get any writing done. I felt stuck and lost – and had no better way of putting it than I lost my mojo.
In my desperation I sent Jessica an email saying I did not want to be whiny but all I did was whine. The daughter had hijacked the story and I could not get out of her zone. I had no idea how else I could kill the husband. I had lost my evil edge on the wife. Life was getting in the way. I did not want to write one more word.
Jessica came to the rescue and told me exactly what I needed to hear: keep writing.
But didn’t she read my email? I did not want to write…you see writing wasn’t being fun anymore. It took work, and time and discipline and pushing myself.
This morning I got the last comments on what I have so far. There is so much writing that still needs to be done. This story keeps getting bigger and bigger. I am not sure how many more Ash Wednesday will go by before I finish this Ash Wednesday but all I can do is write and move forward.
So what have I learned so far: not writing is denying a part of me. I should read as a I write. It took Jonathan Franzen about 9 years between novels. I have to listen to my characters they know what they are doing even if I don’t. When I don’t feel like writing that’s when I have to do it the most. In this writing world I will find caring and generous people who will teach me all they know – like my teachers Jessica Barksdale and Lisa Cron. I will also find amazing friends like Joyce and Willona who will cheer me like I’m the MVP of writing.
Next step? A break. A breather. Hopefully a Summer Writing workshop. Finishing some essays. Attempting to write a different short story (this one about Miami) and getting at least another 99 pages into Ash.
In closing and to sum it all up I shall now quote the great Yo Gabba Gabba philosophers: Keep trying, keep trying, don’t give up, never give up.

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