Category: Writing

Every year we make resolutions – as an author, it’s to write more, to keep growing and learning, but how?

Every year we make resolutions – as an author, it’s to write more, to keep growing and learning, but how?

Every year we make resolutions – as an author, it’s to write more, to keep growing and learning, but how?

Little Red Riding Hood confronts the Big Bad Wolf. Prof. Linda Rodriguez’s class draws inspiration from fairytales to teach the basics of storytelling. Photo:Library of CongressMany students have to complete required courses in creative writing. Here’s how Linda Rodriguez, Professor of Caribbean Literature, Film, and Creative Writing at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, uses the language of fairytales to introduce new writers to the process, and help them overcome their internal obstacles.The creative writing process is often portrayed in a scary way in popular films as in Spike Jonze’sAdaptation(2002) and Peter Jackson’sKing Kong(2005). InAdaptation,Nicolas Cage plays writer Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt a novel into a screenplay and when he asks a question in a writing seminar hosted by guru Robert McKee, played by Brian Cox, the poor writer gets an unsympathetic, curse-strewn tongue lashing.Meanwhile, inKing Kong,Adrien Brody plays Jack Driscoll, another struggling writer who joins a film crew on a sea journey to unknown lands, but while all the other main characters travel comfortably in cabins above deck, Brody travels below the waterline, relegated to the company of caged animals and his lonely typewriter. No fun.After seeing these “tortured” portrayals of writers and their process, what undergraduate student would really want to sign up for a creative writing class? To be honest, many undergraduate students end up in a creative writing class because they need to complete a requirement in English and they have no idea what they are signing up for. And even if they do, they all arrive to class with anxiety that can easily block their creativity the entire semester.As a creative writer, I’ve experienced some of this anxiety myself but also have experienced the positive and rewarding aspects of this discipline. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many wonderful and challenging creative writing teachers while participating in artists’ residencies and programs at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and the University of California-Los Angeles Professional Screenwriting Degree. I admit the creative process is demanding, but we should all have some fun along the way.Engaging beginning writersMy experiences have driven me to think about how to make my creative writing classroom encouraging and supportive of my beginning writers. In order to relieve creative anxiety, having fun became a key component in my creative writing classes, but often this meant bringing in a lot of materials with me to class: colored paper, crayons, paper plates, old magazines, etc.This became a challenge in itself and then I was offered the opportunity to produce a book about creative writing using the Top Hat platform. After I completed the book and began using it, I was happy to discover that Top Hat not only had simplified taking attendance in class but also had quickly become a key element in helping me build a class experience for my beginning writers that put them at ease and helped us all have creative fun.When I started to develop my Top Hat textbook,Creative Writing: Fiction, I found that I could illustrate my chapters with images from classic fairy tales and children’s books that were in the public domain. Looking at these amazing images I felt they could serve as a fun way to introduce my students to the steps of the writing process. For example,Snow Whiteand illustrations of her story became a way to talk about overcoming writer’s block and the Interior Editor. After all, like Snow White in her difficult journey, writers have to deal with obstacles that seem insurmountable.On the other hand, the story ofPinocchioand the images of his ever-growing nose became a way to introduce my beginning writers to the concept of “creative lying” as a way to explore story ideas.Beauty and the Beast’s image of the famous ballroom dance helped me introduce my students to scene building and dialogue. These classic stories hold a special place in our hearts and after using my Top Hat book this past semester, I saw firsthand how they really helped me introduce key steps of the creative writing process in a simple and fun way.One of my favorite chapters in my Top Hat book isThe Path to Our Stories. To illustrate this chapter I used many images from the fairy taleRed Riding Hood.Finding the path from beginning to end requires risk-taking and perseverance and we can all easily get lost along the way. In this chapter I also discuss one of the most difficult steps of the creative writing process, giving and receiving feedback, or peer review. This is the step when beginning writers might feel the most uncomfortable. But Red Riding Hood has come to my aid and now helps me to introduce in a fun way how to constructively deal with reviewers who might be making us a little too uncomfortable by behaving like the Big Bad Wolf.If you would like to know more about using fairy tales and children’s stories to introduce all the steps of the writing process in a fun way, take a look at my Top Hat book,Creative Writing: Fiction.

TO EXPERIENCE SOMETHING TOGETHER I recently experienced how watching a film together turns on the “communing” and “empathy” and“fun” factor when I improvised an “otherness” double feature for my film students at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. First, we watchedNight of the Living Deadand throughout the show in one class section there was intense silence coupled with nervous jumpiness while in another section there was near-constant loud cheering on of the main character, Ben, played by African-American Duane Jones. So all fun!But the ending was a bad let down for all: When Ben gets unceremoniously shot, and the still photos depicting his body being treated as meat start to come one after another, I could feel the communal shock in both of my classes. One of my students asked empathetically,“Is that it?”Implying: “But he’s the hero, the leader, he worked so hard to survive. The movie can’t possibly end this way.” Well it can, because Romero being himself an “outsider” (he was of Cuban-Lithuanian descent) was reflecting in his casting of Duane Jones and the film’s ending the real-life situation of African-Americans in the 1960s who still lived under the threat of mob lynchings. It’s a part of American history that only now is being revisited in a significant way via this month’s inauguration ofThe National Memorial for Peace and Justice.ForGet Out, Peele chose a very different ending from Romero, a final scene of empowerment. And much of the source of this power is to be found in the unlikely character Rod Williams, played with impeccable timing by Milton“Lil Rel”Howery. Rod is a caring person: He feeds and pampers Sid the dog who suffers from digestive issues and constantly warns his friend, Chris Washington, to leave his girlfriend’s family house.Moreover, Rod uses his intelligence and training as a TSA agent, to find and rescue the hero. And Rod achieves all this without ever throwing a punch or shooting someone. In fact, Rod is never even mean to anyone. He is a good guy who humbly goes about his work, but he is empathetic and resourceful and chooses to act, and I would argue, the film’s true hero.

Jordan Peele has called his recent Oscar winner, Get Out (2017), a “social thriller,”but what does he mean by that? Let’s see…In a recent CNN interview, Peele states that as a child he told a scary story around a campfire (an iconic storytelling image!), and seeing his classmates’ spellbound reaction, he realized that:“Wow! What was my fear, it’s kind of become my power, and wielding that artistry felt good.”In writing the screenplay that became the filmGet Out, Peele wielded the power of storytelling he had discovered as a child to explore 21st-century race relations in the United States. And as he wrote, not far from his mind was the legacy ofGeorge Romero‘s first film, about which he says in the same CNN interview: “50 years ago we had ‘Night of the Living Dead’ which was about race and that should have opened up the conversation for more films in that “social thriller” genre.”As part of this genre, Peele also mentionsRosemary’s Baby(1968) andThe Stepford Wives(1975).Peel ends the CNN interview saying:“There is a need for stories that allow an audience to commune, to come together in a theater, not just at home, but a theater, to experience something together, and for stories that promote that empathy and deal with these sort of untold truths but also provide an escape and a fun time. That’s what I’m committed to doing.”Don’t forget to check out the recent re-release ofNight of the Living DeadonThe Criterion Collectionand see all of Jordan Peel’s CNN interview at:‘Get Out’ director: My fear has become my power.

CRONOS (1993) Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed his first feature,Cronos, when he was only 28 years old. With a budget of $2 million, del Toro shot this unforgettable film in about 8 weeks and it went on to win9 Ariel Awardsin Mexico, theCritic’s Prizeat France’sCannes Film Festival, and many other awards.Cronos, set in Veracruz in 1536, is a re-telling of the vampire-monster myth. While the film’s title alludes to the disturbing story of the Greek deity Cronus, who castrated his father and ate his children, the film’s setting hints at the violence of European colonialism and exploitation of the New World. In 1519, only 19 years before the story told inCronosbegins, on Easter Friday, Hernán Cortés had landed on Mexico’s eastern coast naming itVilla Rica de la Vera Cruzin reference to the gold sources he expected to exploit and Christ’s crucifixion.It’s interesting to note that the same year that del Toro was filmingCronosin Mexico, across the border,Bram Stoker’s Dracula(1992) was mesmerizing audiences in the USA. This film, written byJames V. Hartand directed byFrancis Ford Coppola, as del Toro’sCronos, hooks us in with its opening narrative that integrates historical events with the idea that everlasting life might be more of a curse than a blessing. WhileBram Stoker’s Draculakeeps us glued to our seats staying close to the original 19thcentury European novel, and an exuberant to-die-for-vampire played with relish byGary Oldman, del Toro’s take on Stoker’s mythical creature travels a different route.Del Toro explores the myth through the story of Jesús Gris, loving grandfather, and owner of an antique and art bazaar, and Aurora, his granddaughter. Aurora is speech-less, but apparently only by choice, as toward the film’s end we discover she can speak when she says, “Abuelo.” In her quietness and playfulness (we often see her with her teddy bear and playing hopscotch with her grandfather), the young Aurora anticipates the adult Elisa Esposito inThe Shape of Water.PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006)InPan’s Labyrinththe monstrous has now mutated into the mythical Faun, a half-human-half-beast creature related to the Greek deity Pan, and the Pale Man, cannibalistic devourer of fairies and children. But the most unrelenting monster in this film is Captain Vidal, who like the Richard Strickland character inThe Shape of Water, is driven by his sense of absolute patriarchal superiority to all human “Others” and the wondrous creature he rips out of a South American jungle with some vague aim to exploit in the name of science.Yet, both Captain Vidal and Strickland dismiss the importance of science, so that inPan’s LabyrinthVidal shoots Doctor Ferreiro and inThe Shape of Water, Strickland tortures the Russian scientist instead of helping him after he has been tricked and shot by his own people. But whilePan’s Labyrinthis set in an ultra-nationalist-fascist Spain in 1944 in a farmhouse surrounded by a magical forest, in his latest mythical tale del Toro brings us to the USA and closer to our times.THE SHAPE OF WATER(2017)The screenplay forThe Shape of Waterwas co-written by del Toro andVanessa Taylor,producer, TV, screenwriter, and as a child, a writer of fairy-tales. The story is set in the early 1960s, takes place in an urban setting, Baltimore, and abounds in references to the lack of full civil rights for most Americans and Cadillacs, space exploration, and the Cold War. A great part of the story develops in a secretive research facility that has been infiltrated by a Soviet spy, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, in a similar fashion as the Manhattan Project had been infiltrated by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist, and a real Soviet spy.But whileThe Shape of Watertackles serious socio-historical issues that we have not yet resolved, in fact, its tag line is “A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times,” the main character, Elisa, retains some of the innocent playfulness of the child characters, Aurora and Ofelia, of the earlier films,CronosandPan’s Labyrinth.Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, as Aurora inCronos, is playful in more ways than one: In the film’s first scenes we see her pleasuring herself in the bathtub and she spends her free time with a grandfather-like visual artist Giles, with whom she “tap-dances” as they watch Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. And talking about dancing… Elisa, as Ofelia inPan’s Labyrinth, is a Cinderella-type. Certainly, both Elisa and Ofelia are associated with shoes, but even more, they are symbolical of a person neglected by those around them but who eventually, with supernatural help, achieve their full “royal” potential.InPan’s Labyrinth, the final voice-over tells us that Ofelia: “The princess returned to her father’s kingdom.” While the narrator inThe Shape of Waterin the opening monologue calls Elisa: “The princess without a voice.” In the end, Elisa also joins the ranks of the super-natural as she transforms to become consort to her “prince” in his watery kingdom… and then one of her shoes floats away! Perhaps in her new world of expanded potential, Elisa will no longer be concerned with shoes and other restraints. The princess is now all grown up and can choose to wear shoes, or not! Indeed, the last image ofThe Shape of Waterseems to tell us:Times Up!

The message, in Roman Jakobson’s Theory of Communication, is what you want to communicate to the receiving end of the conversation. The Romans used the words of Cato the Elder to describe its importance: Remtene,verba sequentur – grasp the concept, and the words will follow.Albert Einstein delved even deeper into the importance of being able to convey the message in multiple ways, including the simplest, when he said that“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother”.Awareness of what we want to communicate greatly improves the delivery of the message: this is why it’s good practice to rehearse public speeches, why we play important conversations in our mind before they occur, and even more so why we should plan in advance when we write and publish.The Message in MarketingCopywriters and marketers often face pressure from their clients or employers to put out “fluff” content for the sole purpose of showing activity to an audience, or occupy space to fit a pretty design: underestimating the power of the message can ultimately compromise the results of any campaign through the absence of meaningful content, so businesses beware! Marketing communication relies heavily on crafting the message according to the receiving audience; content should be crafted consistently with thedesired outcome. If there is no point to your content, it shouldn’t be there in the first place.Poetic FunctionOn the other hand, when the entire focus of the communication is placed on the unabridged version of the message itself, the Poetic Function comes into play – art for art’s sake. This is true for visual arts, music, as well as performing arts – the nature of the message doesn’t change, whether the Code used to express it is a canvas, a camera, an orchestra, a pen, or the body itself.It’s important to note that art for art’s sake is also necessarily open for interpretation; if the purpose of our communication is to achieve something, even as simple as understanding, its function is no longer poetic. The message is typically the starting point of a well-thought communication, but once we know what we want to say (the Message), and who we want to communicate with (the Receiver), we have to understand how (the Code), where (Channel), what voice we want to use (the Addresser) and the surrounding elements which may influence the conversation (Context).The ability to have rich and complex conversations is one of humanity’s unique qualities: think about what you are expressing, and you will own your message.

One of the courses I will be teaching this semester at UPRM’s English Department/Minor in Film Programis all about archetypal supernatural characters. I’ve been teaching this course for some time now and it’s become a favorite among students. But it’s still surprising to me that I now make a living in part thinking, reading, and talking about angels, vampires, and monsters.HOW DID I GET HERE?When I was doing my B.A. and graduate studies, I read and wrote on “canonical” writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Chaucer… and I also readBeowulf.which sure is about some scary monsters!On the other hand, Shakespeare has a collection of quite beautiful supernatural beings inIt’s a Midsummer Night’s DreamandThe Tempest, and Milton goes on for some 10 thousand verses about angels and the fallen type inParadise Lost.While Cervantes’s monstrous giants emerge from his main character’s fevered imagination and desire to be a noble knight. And Chaucer? Well, I just remember him being very funny.But, when I decided on a topic for my Ph.D. thesis, I chose to write about Caribbean women writers. And it was one of these women who first took me to seriously reflect on angels, vampires,andmonsters:Jean Rhys, the Dominican-born writer who publishedWide Sargasso Seain 1966.WIDE SARGASSO SEA and NC-17Let me add an interesting tidbit here: The first film version ofWide Sargasso Seawasfinally released in 1993. But it didn’t do that well financially, in part because the film received theNC-17rating.This rating is still controversial, and according toThe Hollywood Reporter, it is“box-office poison.”But enough of NC-17!JEAN RHYSJean RhyswroteWide Sargasso Seawhile on her self-imposed exile in England, and with it, she created a subversive back-story for the ever-popular (about 20 TV and film adaptations)Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre(1847).This novel tells the story of a Mr. Rochester and the wife he keeps imprisoned in his attic declaring himself a victim and she as a foreign woman, insane and dark, an“Other.”ZOMBIESTurning things upside down, Jean Rhys’ novel exposed the Caribbean wife’s victimization.The relationship is first presented as a “passionate love” between the second-born-no-title-or-cash Mr. Rochester and the wealthy, free-spirited Creole Antoinette Cosway. Then, because of the Englishman’s prejudices, the “love” quickly (d)evolves into a master/slave relationship in which Rochester appropriates all of Antoinette’s wealthand her liberty.Rochester turns Antoinette into a “walking dead.” And in the Jean Rhys novel, there is plenty of talk of zombies! Not theGeorge Romero(RIP) type, but the original Caribbean zombies. That is, something closer to what was shown in early Hollywood horror films likeEdwardandVictor Halperin‘sWhite Zombie.I first watchedWhite Zombiewith my students in a Caribbean literature class. The scene that has stayed with me takes place around minute 13. In it, we see“zombified”Haitians pushing a large, heavy wheel, part of bigger machinery, the international sugar industry. They work without complaint or sound. In fact, the only sound in this scene is the knife-like screechy sound of the turning wheel.White Zombieis in the public domain and you can watch ithere.Definitely, zombies pushed me closer to developing my course on angels, vampires, and monsters. And then a graduate student gave me the final shove over the threshold.VAMPIRESOne day a young woman walked into my basement office with a bag full of books. She started taking them out one by one while saying things like:“This vampire loved this vampire, but this vampire really loved this other one… it’s all about the human condition.”I was dumbfounded and a bit scared. I held a longstanding dread of vampires thanks to my mother’s late-night watching of one ofChristopher Lee‘s films. As a child, one glimpse of his blood-shot eyes drove me to years of pressing two teddy bears against each side of my neck before trying to fall asleep as protection against Dracula’s bite.But I was curious about vampires and I agreed to direct her Master’s Degree thesis onAnne Rice‘s novels. The thesis took a couple of years of research and writing, which meant that as the work progressed both the student and I read quite a bit about vampires and related issues. When completed the thesis was titled“The New Face of the Vampire: Autobiographical Fiction in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles.”Its author,Camille L. Cortés López,successfully defended it 10 years ago in 2007. From there she went on to complete our Minor in Film and is now working in Los Angeles for Espada P.R.Obviously, by the end of the vampire thesis, my fate was sealed. I turned to the dark side of academia and gave myself over heart and mind to developing the class now titled:Angels, Vampires, and Monsters or De-Cloaking the Human “Other.”During the following weeks, I will write more about my film course.

Irony is defined as the ability to say one thing while meaning another. It’s a subtle technique that implies the risk of not being immediately grasped by the audience while providing an immensely powerful tool for communication by tapping into the mutual understanding and interpretation of context. Not surprisingly, the use of irony is an exquisitely human trait: despite increasing degrees of contextual awareness that can be embedded in computer code, artificial intelligence has the structural limit of a literal understanding of natural language.