Francisco’s Journal

Periodically I get inquiries from young people (and older ones too) who want to write or publish their first novel. By way of response, I would like to share with you some thoughts about the writing of my first novel, The Way of the Jaguar.

I started writing Jaguar about seven years before it was published. Of course I was not writing continuously. In terms of time frames, the process of creation went like this. I wrote pretty much every day for about eight months and came out with what I thought was a best seller and which I proceeded to send out to agents and publishing houses and in the process picked up dozens of rejections. Besides sending it out to publishers and agents I gave the book to a few friends and one or two gave me helpful comments. I think that at this time I put the book away for about three years. When I picked the manuscript again, I started to re-write the whole book. I would begin each writing session by reading a scene of what I had written before and then I would start writing from scratch. Many of the same scenes were kept, but they were embodied in different language. But more significantly, many more scenes were added. This re-writing took about a year. Again I sent it out and again amidst the many rejections I received a letter from a publisher who told me that the book was an “unpolished gem” and she was specific about what did not work for her. This is when the third version of the book came into being. In this third version I did not re-write totally from scratch I re-structured. I connected. I changed where the story started, organized chapters into more logical common themes and time frames. By this time I knew that the book was not the type that would be picked up by a commercial publisher so I sent it to the type of small non-profit literary presses that specialized in Hispanic-American literature. That’s when Bilingual Review Press out of Arizona State University decided to publish it. A few months later, the book won one of the Chicano/Latino Literary Awards.

This is sort of the external history of the book. The internal history is more complicated. I have always wanted to be a writer. When I was nine years old my father bought me a typewriter, which I still have. But wanting to be a writer and writing are two different things. I majored in English in Philosophy in college. I studied Latin American literature at Harvard because I thought graduate school would help me write. I have kept a journal since I was in high school and I think that that’s how the book was born. The book is the daily journal of a person on death row. One day when I was writing in my journal I decided to imagine that I was a prisoner who was about to die. So then I just started inventing. The book is a grafting, a mixing of reality and fantasy. For example, the law firm that I used to work at had these yearly outings at a country club and I took that and created a scene where the main character was at a similar outing in the pool with the person he loved.

In thinking back, I see that I wrote this book at a particularly difficult period of my life. Writing is good therapy. But, of course, good therapy does not always result in good writing. The book was published because I was able to transform the writing that was helpful to me into good writing. The Way of the Jaguar was published in 2000. My attitudes toward writing have changed somewhat since then. Now I write books whose main characters are young people. But the experience of writing that first book showed me how to discover and accept the purpose of writing in my life.

Craftsmanship is the how of writing. It is the part of writing that can be practiced and learned. The writer is artist, true. He or she possesses the artistic impulse. But the writer must also be a craftsman. She must know how to measure the wood and how to cut it and where it can be nailed and how to make a house or a cabinet by following rules that will provide for the cabinet to open and the house to stay up. I like talking about craftsmanship because it tends to deflate our highfalutin notions of what writing is all about. The less highfalutin your notions about writing and about yourself the more and the better you will write. Think of yourself, if you must think of yourself at all, as a person learning a trade. If you are starting out, you are an apprentice. If you have been doing it for a while, you are an experienced craftsman who must challenge herself with every task and still learning. But here is the key point I want to make. In the eyes of God, I don’t think that being a writer is any more special, any better than being a carpenter. In the eyes of God, writing a book and building a table are equally good. What counts is the care and the love and patience that went into the making. What counts is the talents that are expressed in the creation. It’s good now and then to try to see the way God would see.

I am not a good carpenter. When I was in first grade in Mexico, I was so bad when it came to doing crafts, that the teacher would let me tell the class stories whenever the class worked on a project I would sit on a stool in the front of the class and make up a story on-the-go as the class made wooden clowns that you could roll on the ground with a long wooden stick. I’m not sure any of my classmates were envious of me up there, but I was envious of them. Now I think that my classmates and I were just using a different medium. Be a carpenter of words.

One of the questions that I am asked by people who have read the “advanced review copies” of Marcelo in the Real World is what inspired me to write about a young man like Marcelo. I am not sure that we are ever able to accurately pinpoint the origins of an idea. We carry a seed within us. It came to us when we were a child perhaps. Then one day something happens and the seed presents itself to our consciousness and we water it with attention and we make it grow. When I was a boy growing up in Mexico, I would buy every Sunday a comic book called “Vidas Ilustres” or “Illustrious Lives”. The comic book presented each week the life of a different saint. I collected hundreds of these and the lives of saints filled me with visions of heroism and sacrifice. Was this the seed that forty-five years later turned into the story of a pure, saint-like young man who spends his time reading the holy books? During my senior year at Spring Hill College I lived in a L’Arche community, a Christian community where people with developmental disabilities and “normal” staff lived together with as few barriers between them as possible. Was this the seed that thirty-eight years later turned into the story of a young man diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome? I can try to answer as best I can what inspired me to write Marcelo in the Real World - but my answer in the end will be a guess. The wind blows where it wills. We carry within us seeds placed there by the life we lead. And then one day the seeds present themselves to us gently or forcefully and will us to make them grow with life.

The rain on this April evening reminds of my grandfather’s house in Tampico, Mexico, where I grew up. It is the sound of the rain on the roof of the house. The soft light of the lamp falling on the book. Mostly I think the memories come from the combination of sound and warmth. In my grandfather’s house, la casa de mi abuelito, the roof was made of tin and so the rain made sounds that, depending on the force of the rain, resembled anything from dozen ballerinas tip toeing to a million marbles dropping out of a big bag in the sky. Even as a six-year-old, I liked the rain. I liked it when it rained so hard that the noise absorbed all my thoughts and there was this delicious mixture of fear and safety. Inevitably, during those hard rain storms, the lights would go out. Then, the kerosene lamps were lit and there was complete immersion in all the senses: the sound of the rain, the smell of kerosene, the shadows cast by the flickering flames. If it was too early to go to sleep, then we would all sit in the living room, listening, maybe saying a word here and there. A word or two now and then was all that was needed.