Ask the Author: R. Garcia Vazquez

I wrote a version of Mr. Galaxy's Unfinished Dream back in 1998 but never showed it to anyone because it was so bad. I had worked on it in spurts in spare moments in the midst of raising a family and working a less than fulfilling full-time job. But the idea stayed with me and I finally was able to incarnate it and get it published in December 2017.

What triggered the idea was a family wedding in rural Pennsylvania that took place in the 1980's. At the time I was a struggling young husband and father beset with a number of personal challenges posed by my new state of life and the expectations that came with it. The rural setting and circumstances proved irresistible to my highly active imagination.

Since I was a young teen I've always felt the "need" to write, I've always jotted down ideas, kept notes about possible characters and stories. The desire to write compelling meaningful stories has always produced in me an almost gnawing sensation, something that had to be addressed or relieved. It is only in the last year and a half that I have been able to write full time.

I'm not sure that I "get inspired to write," as I have always been ready to write, but unable to address that need in any focused and sustained way until now.

A related question might be, "Why do you write what you write about?" As a person who loves deeply and desires for all of us to love deeply, I find myself drawn to stories about people waging combat against those demons that would keep us from being our better selves. The human drama is so complex and compelling and universal that I am perpetually inspired, I suppose, or motivated to write about it. We human beings make for remarkable subjects, and, to quote one of my characters, "... you and I are capable of extraordinary things--good and evil of the highest order and magnitude."

I just published, Mr. Galaxy's Unfinished Dream, which I think of as a novel about love under siege. If I had to summarize the plot in one sentence, it would go something like this: "Disillusioned young husband struggles to save marriage and sanity after getting involved with cheerful, albeit increasingly erratic and mystifying, middle-aged woman he meets at work." That is an oversimplification, of course. The story can be read as a kind of young man's odyssey, but metaphor and allusion adds a layer of density for those who enjoy that aspect of literature.

I'm also working on No Other Pearl, a collection of short stories that explore the complex relationships between men and women (to be published in the Spring of 2018).

People write for different reasons, but my answer is directed to aspiring writers who are haunted by the necessity to write, who think about writing all the time, maybe even decades, before they actually write that first novel.

If you're serious about writing, I offer three major recommendations: 1) Read great writers (old and new) and learn why they are great. Read what other qualified writers and critics have to say about quality fiction. Take classes, attend lectures, listen to tapes (I love the Great Courses CD's on Literature taught by some of the top professors in the country);

2) Get feedback on your writing from people who understand what good writing is (don't take too much stock in what family and friends say, unless they are serious readers), either from other writers, professors, or writing groups. Measure your work against the recommendations and insights of books written by qualified critics or teachers (e.g., "Stein on Writing," "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers," etc.);

3) Treat your writing with the utmost respect. Hemingway thought of writing as a kind of bleeding. If you're going to bleed, make it count. Reach high. Don't settle for less than your best. It took me three months to write the first draft of the novel I just published, Mr. Galaxy's Unfinished Dream. It took me fifteen more months to rewrite and revise it before I felt that I had done all I could do to make it good.

I'm thinking of two types of writer's block. One is simply having the desire or need to write with nothing to write about; all you can do is stare at a blank page (or screen). The second type is getting stuck in the middle of the writing process, like running a long distance and suddenly falling down. I find the former the easier of the two to manage.

If you understand that writing is really all about rewriting, you should have no hesitation in putting down on the page any word or phrase that pops into your head. The physical act of writing offers a gateway through writer's block. Write anything. Just keep typing or scripting anything that occurs to you, whether it makes sense or not. Look at where you are, pick an object (your coffee cup, a desk lamp), name it, give it life, make it move, give it a history, let it tell you its story. Give your brain a stimulus, a reason to unleash your imagination. The act of writing, even if all you're putting down is gibberish, will eventually--and it won't take long--filter out the nonsense and begin to produce meaning.

When I used to teach writing at a community college, I always encouraged my students to write without fear. Get something down, anything, and keep doing that until you produce something that can begin to be understood by someone else. Then go back and rewrite. The worst thing a writer can do when he or she experiences writer's block is to sit and stare at a blank page.

The second type of writer's block, getting stuck in the middle of the writing, for me, is the far more challenging type. Even so, I have attacked it in much the same way as the first. If I'm stuck, I begin to free associate, write whatever occurs to me about any of my characters and their circumstances. I may check old notes, things that occurred to me maybe even months earlier. If I come up with something I like, then I have to see if I can make it work within the context of the overall story. Sometimes that leads to interesting new twists. And even if I don't use that bit of writing, more often than not, it leads me to other possibilities. On occasion I have taken some elusive element that I liked too much to dismiss and locked myself in a quiet room or car for an hour or two just trying to visualize how this can work within the larger context of the novel.