MANUSCRIPT SPARK
Many authors, aspiring and professional, are asked what inspires their writing. What makes a writer want to share their thoughts/perceptions with the world? Where do their story ideas come from? How do they find the motivation to continue longer projects or multiple revisions?
For me, it started with a picture:
Mis abuelos on their wedding day.
This wedding photo inspired my manuscript.
This isn’t the best picture of a picture, but it’s the best one I have right now. And it’s the photo featured (in writing) in the first chapter of my novel’s manuscript.
This photograph is the only picture I have of my grandparents. It’s also the only photo my dad has, and quite possibly, the only picture of them that exists.
Because both of them died before I was born, this picture is all I have of them. Plenty of people grow up not knowing grandparents or great-grandparents, but the main thing with this picture is how it made me hyperaware of where my heritage left off. After my grandparents, a lot of my family stopped speaking Spanish and stopped speaking to each other. They discontinued cooking traditional family recipes, moved away from Latinx communities, and never returned to the island.
I grew up so far away from anyone who knew even fragments of Puerto Rican culture that I grew up not thinking of myself as Latinx. I felt disconnected from my roots, and many days, I still feel that way.
That being said, since I’ve started talking to my dad about mis abuelos, I’ve learned the following about them:
Abuela was shorter than 5 feet tall.
Abuelo, on the other hand, was a tower.
Abuela stood on a giant crate under her wedding dress so she could be seen in the photo.
They knew each other only about 6 months before getting married.
Abuela only spoke Spanish.
Abuelo knew Spanish and English, but only spoke English. Taught his kids to only speak English too.
They loved each other very much for a long time. Their marriage began happily.
The more questions I asked my dad and his siblings, the more I learned about how different things could turn out from how they’d started. The more I learned, the less clear I was about my family’s history and how it fell apart.
Initially, I was gutted. Almost felt more lost than when I’d started. But it also propelled me deeper into finding new ways to think about family and culture. About how to bring heritage into the present tense instead of just living in the past. About what new directions my manuscript needed to take.
Want to keep up-to-date on my writing and heritage exploration journeys? Be sure to follow me blog, and follow me @writessalazar on Instagram and Twitter.
