Not everyone is lucky enough to have a fun, witty, talented college roommate who can rattle off the titles, actors, and songs from classic movies of the 1940's and 50's like nobody's business, but I was. That person is my friend and fellow writer Daisy Abreu, who has gone on to pursue writing with dogged determination and great passion, becoming published along the way. Below she doles out some solid wisdom about the act of putting pen to paper, and tells us how she's been exploring her Cuban-American roots in the process. How do you define creativity? I struggled with this one. For me, creativity is having a vision and figuring out how to make it work. I love to brainstorm because it pushes me to focus and everything else is out of my mind but the subject at hand.

When do you feel at your creative peak (whether it's times of day, seasons of the year, or otherwise)? Having time and space to work while I was at the Vermont Studio Center in October allowed me to look at my writing time as a full 24-hour period. I didn’t have outside obligations to use as excuses for not writing. During those four weeks, I found I was most productive in the late morning and early afternoon. That said, my favorite time to work is late at night. I feel more focused when everything outside my window is quiet.

Last we spoke you were writing about your Cuban heritage. I've heard some people say all storytelling is a search for identity. Does that ring true to you or not? Absolutely true. When I started working on my essay collection, I was working solely from my memories. I wrote what I remembered from my childhood, stories about being around my family and community. The deeper I went into those stories, the more I discovered about my family and myself. Even though I grew up in a community largely made up of families similar to my own, I uncovered so much working on the collection. Not just from research and reading and looking at old photos, but from talking to my peers about how we grew up. I did a series of interviews with former classmates for my third semester project (part of the requirement for graduation from the MFA program) and was surprised to learn how similar and dissimilar our experiences had been. The men and women I interviewed were all my age, and I assumed they had the same experience I did. I assumed they had all been born in the United States, all had siblings that were much older than they were, and that their parents had all fled Cuba in the same way. Only one person out of the four had an experience that was remotely similar to mine. I also believed I was the only one whose parents had been reluctant to share the stories of their journeys, but every person I spoke to said they had not been able to get their parents to talk until they were much older.

The essays also gave me an opportunity to go deeper in conversation with my siblings and my mother about their personal histories. My siblings helped me get my mom to talk about her life in Cuba. My sister sent me copies of documents I didn’t know existed: a telegram my father sent to an aunt who was already living in America, paperwork from their stay in Florida, all of this ephemera that made their story—my story—so much more real.

You received a master's degree in writing a few years ago. What were the pros and cons of that experience? Pros: spending time with other writers and being full-on word nerds for ten days at a time, learning how to talk about the work, learning how to give and accept constructive criticism, professors who pushed as much as they praised, being introduced to writers whose work I might not have discovered on my own, developing the discipline to come home and read and write after a full day at work.

Cons (challenges): trying to balance a full-time job with full-time schoolwork, pushing through the writing of difficult scenes (lots of writing and crying), getting past feeling like an imposter “Why am I doing this? What makes me think I can?”

What do you find to be the most exhilarating part of writing? Two things. First, reading a great sentence. The kind of sentence that makes you reach for a pen and a notecard so you can copy it down. There is a sense of possibility in that for me. It inspires me. Well, it makes me want to give up. But then it makes me want to work even harder.

I write in longhand when I am trying to sort out an idea or a scene. When I’m typing things up later, I sometimes come across a sentence I don’t remember writing, and I think it’s a good sentence. Not a great one necessarily, but a good one. That is exhilarating.

What do you find to be the most challenging part of writing? Not knowing where or how to start a piece, and allowing the not knowing to keep me from starting to work.

What are your goals this year with your creative work? To say “I’m a writer,” when people ask me what I do. To get back to writing every day for more than one hour at a stretch. To send my work out and collect an awesome stack of rejections (and hopefully a few acceptances).

I’m also leaving my full-time job in two months to pursue freelance and contract work. Ultimately, I want to create a space for writers in New Haven that provides studios, opportunities for collaborations with other writers, workshops and classes, readings, and tutoring for students. That’s the big dream.

Any daily habits or routines? I carry index cards and a pen to write down questions I can use as prompts or passages from things I’m reading that I think are beautiful. I am not writing every day (yet), but I am reading every day, usually before bed, which is something I’ve done since I was very young.

Advice for aspiring writers? Share your work with other writers and be open to giving and receiving constructive criticism. Read your work in public every chance you get. Keep reading. Keep writing.

Daisy Christina Abreu is a first generation Cuban-American born and raised in West New York, New Jersey. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Hartford, and an MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University where she served as co-editor of creative non-fiction for the online literary journal, Mason's Road. Her work has been published in the online journal Label Me Latina and The Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Arts Paper. Daisy lives in New Haven, Connecticut. She can be reached by email at daisycabreu@gmail.com or via her blog here. Top photo by Matthew J. Feiner. Bio pic by Chris Randall.

It occurred to me this week that I haven't said nearly enough about writers and writing on the blog.

Perhaps that's because I find the how's and what's of the writing process a tricky thing to identify and nail down. How each one of us engages with this strange human act of trying to accurately convey our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and ideas with written language is as varied as our own backgrounds. That said, I've been stringing words together for almost as long as I've been alive, and there are a few things I've learned about the process.

1) It's much more than crafting words into paragraphs and paragraphs into pages. The writing process is akin to the birthing process. There are stages of conception, gestation and birth. As with actual pregnancy, writing must first be conceived then be given time to grow. That time of growth includes note-taking, outlining, having imaginary conversations with characters, cultivating ideas, mulling over theme, and more. Though there's often not much tangible output during the gestation phase, it must be considered as important as the actual writing. In fact, I consider that stage to be part of the writing process. Allow your creative writing the time and space it needs on the front end and you'll have a more fruitful writing experience overall.

2) The inner editor is the ultimate frenemy. Having a solid inner editor is hugely important for crafting a tight work, but if you can't turn that voice off while you're writing, your work's in danger. The editor should always be in service to the writer, not the other way around. That means, most importantly, when you're writing a first draft, don't re-read and tweak as you go along. Allow the work to be birthed in all of its messy glory before trying to fix it. Do your best to be a writer when you're writing and an editor when you're editing.

3) Everything has a beginning, middle, and end. We all know that stories have a beginning, middle and end, but so do chapters, paragraphs and sentences. When you keep this in mind at every stage of writing you can craft work that feels whole and solid to the readers. Rereading and editing with beginnings, middles and ends in mind also helps you identify where there may be holes or flaws in the work.

4) It will cause pain. There are many famous quotes about the pain of writing. Dorothy Parker's is among my favorites, "I hate writing, I love having written." I don't know why writing can cause us so much pain at times, I just know that it does. The pain is not an indication of a person's ability as a writer. It's merely a by-product of the process. Don't let pain stop you if you have something to say.

5) Let it be bad when it's bad. We've all been there, that place where we reread what we've written and think, "God, that's bad." One of the worst things you can do as a writer is to allow bad writing to stop you in your tracks or derail your project. The more you do this the more you know that bad writing is inevitable. Since, as they say, "all writing is rewriting," there is no need to concern yourself with bad writing. Let it be. It will get weeded out later. For now, just be glad that you're savvy enough to know when something's bad. The real problem occurs when you don't.

6) Passion requires protection. Passion is the engine that drives good writing, whether it be passion for a particular subject matter, for the story or for the act of writing itself. When we spend too much time doing things like looking at industry statistics, studying a publishing model, comparing ourselves to others, trying to get more money, etc. we can cause our passion to dwindle. And when our passion starts to dwindle, we're on a slippery slope because this is hard work and, oftentimes, we're not getting compensated for it. What else do we have then but passion? So, do whatever you can to protect it even, and especially, if that means shutting the outside world out for periods of time.

7) Know the destination at the beginning of the journey. For those who want to make a living as a writer it's important to think about what that end game looks like. Do you want to be published in a literary magazine or have your trade paperbacks in bookstores? Do you want to be respected by a small niche of peers in your area of expertise or sell a million copies of an e-book? Probably it's a combination of many of those things. The trick is to have an idea of what you want going into to it. Why? Because writing is hard, time-consuming work and when you do it you actively disregard other things in life that you could be doing like, you know, crocheting, or cooking, or sleeping, or hanging out with friends. When you know the destination on the front end it will save you time and energy along the way and keep you focused on what projects, bodies of work, themes and opportunities are important. Simply put, the destination informs the journey.

8) Don't share until your ready. I never share a project when it's in the first draft phase. Ever. Feedback in the first draft stage can very easily derail a project since first drafts, by their very nature, need a lot of work. Do what you can to get the work to a solid point before sharing with others. Feedback should always only move you forward, never prevent you from moving ahead.

9) Share as much as you can. Once the work is ready, however, share it far and wide. The best way to revise and tighten your work is to find the commonality between the voices giving you feedback. The more voices you have, the better. Beyond that sharing oneself in this way is a brave thing to do, and bravery requires practice. Plus, you're writing this work for others to enjoy, aren't you? So don't be shy. Get it out there and let them enjoy it!

10) The more you write the less precious your work becomes. It's easy to get crushed when someone doesn't respond enthusiastically to something you've written, particularly when you don't have many works under your belt. When you write a lot and often each piece becomes slightly less precious. When the work is beloved but not precious it's easier to look at it more objectively.

11) Not everything is meant to live on and on. This goes hand in hand with #10. The more you write the more you realize (usually in hindsight) that some works are practice works, some are writing samples, and others, if we're lucky, are meant to live on as published works. It takes time and space to fully realize a work's destiny, but the more you do it the more you'll make peace with the fact that some of your babies were born only for your own pleasure and enjoyment. Embrace this fact and keep on writing.

Photo by E. Streit.