Natalia M. Sylvester

A few weeks ago I posted about the difficulties in making a writers group work. Getting a group of like-minded writers to commit to meeting periodically and coordinate their schedules can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort if you can get it to work. And if you can’t, it’s really not the end of the world.

In one of my writing groups, after several attempts at meeting, we decided to embrace our aversion to scheduled meetings. Now every first Thursday of the month (used to be the last, but we switched it) we get together for “non-meetings.” Not everyone shows every time, and there are no hard feelings. We don’t turn in work to critique because not everyone has something ready to hand in, and that’s okay, too. The point is to get together with other writers and do writing exercises on the spot, so even if we came in with no new work we may walk out with the first paragraph of something great.

So basically, we took all the rules for forming a writers’ group and did the exact opposite. It’s now the longest-running group I’ve ever been in. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk to enough writers and read enough books about writing and you’ll get a lot of advice about how to get organized before the first word is on the page. After all, as my high school journalism teacher used to say, do you get in the car without knowing where you’re going?

What I learned real quick is that what works for one writer might not work for the next. Some people are outliners. I find this method helpful only when I’m working on shorter pieces of work. I’ve heard many novelists say they use color-coded index cards to plot their books, but when I tried this with my novel I just ended up with more stacks of messy papers on my desk that just happened to be colorful. Finally I tried a word map (you know, central idea in the center of the page, then it branches out like a family tree?), but an 8.5 x 11 inch paper ended up being too small, and instead of organizing my ideas I felt they were getting entangled in each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve had the urge to be a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire because of all the random facts I’ve learned from writing.

The number of miles a bee needs to fly to produce a pound of honey? 25,000. The inventor of the trapeze used in aerial dance? Terry Sendgraff. The two major types of stroke? Hemorrhagic and ischemic. That ought to get me at least $64,000, right? (Courtesy of a couple of feature articles and some marketing copy I wrote for a hospital.)

The funny thing with research is that if you do it right, you’ll do a whole lot of it, but not all of it will end up in your final copy. When asked to write about something you don’t know much about, the key isn’t to collect a ton of facts and later regurgitate them in your writing. Read the rest of this entry »

Today what’s on my mind is a bit of a shameless plug, but there’s a lesson here, I promise!

Here it is: NPR mentioned my essay on racism amongst Latinos, which I wrote for this month’s issue of Latina magazine, on yesterday’s “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin. The essay was born out of a pseudo-compliment I’ve received most of my life from other Latinos (listen for it at about the 5-minute mark).

The thing is, I never would’ve found out about this if it weren’t for my obsessive habit of Googling my name on an almost daily basis (admit it, you do it, too). Since I’m in the process of re-writing my site for SEO, I often check to see how it’s ranking (you’d be surprised how many Natalia Maldonado’s are out there). Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I hear most often when I tell people what I do (aside from the “who do you write for?” question) is “That’s great! You can work from anywhere!”

This is true only to a certain extent. If I move it probably won’t affect my work that much, but I’ve been guilty of going on trips and not taking my work with me as much as I should. And I don’t mean vacation trips. Last month I helped my sister move out of state and stayed at her house for about a week. I took my laptop and told myself I’d get lots of work done, but in the end all I really ended up doing was preparing my taxes for the second quarter estimates.

I guess I’m just a creature of habit. I don’t do the whole write-at-a-starbucks-coffee-shop thing. I tried working from a Panera once because they offered free wi-fi but felt guilted into buying a soup and salad. I need quiet, I need my desk, I need my piles of papers surrounding me.

But lately I feel the urge to get out the office and interact with actual humans. Read the rest of this entry »

My husband is switching careers into computer animation, and as a result of marital osmosis, (whatever information he absorbs trickles down to me in some affect), I’ve learned a lot about this field. Turns out, a lot of it can be applied to writing.

On a recent road trip, we listened to a 9-hour audiobook on the history of Pixar. While he was fascinated by the company’s humble beginnings in Silicon Valley and their limitless artistic vision, I jotted down notes of my own. True, some of us may have heard these lessons before, but there’s something about having a wooden toy doll illustrate a point that really hammered it all in for me. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m tempted to include the typewriter in the corner of my mom’s office as one of my first workspaces, but the keyword here is WORK, and I doubt a four-year-old writing limericks that rhymed with “Coke” really qualifies.

When I first started freelancing full-time, my office consisted of a shiny new Macbook and the dining room table of our one-bedroom apartment. At the end of each day, I had piles of papers, folders, notepads, envelopes and pens scattered across the table, and come dinnertime it all had to be transferred elsewhere. When we moved into a bigger one-bedroom apartment the living room had space in the corner for a small desk, so I switched headquarters. Only problem was, being in the same room as your kitchen, couch and television doesn’t make for the best work ethic.

Read the rest of this entry »