What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez | In conversation with debut novelist Claire Jiménez

@bowie · 1yr ago · 1:15

#askafailure

I'm curious if you knew from the beginning if this story needed to be told from multiple perspectives, or if that's something you discovered along the way while drafting. I'm also curious if you could speak to how failure or rejection played any role in the creation of the novel or drafts, or your journey in getting it into the world. Bye

#writingadvice @aayanisms @Binati_Sheth @Her_Sisu

@bowie · 1yr ago · 1:25

This first question is is seeking some writing advice and I have condensed it down to kind of COVID everything that people said they were interested in and would love to hear from you about. So the questions are this how do you find a balance between writing what you want to write versus writing for the market or what you may believe sell at this moment in time? Is there a way to write and then market your book that feels authentic while still increasing awareness of your work internationally?

@bowie · 1yr ago · 0:33

#writinglife @TaliaTalks

This next question comes from Talia Rodriguez, and it's about the writing life. And she wanted to know how has writing impacted your identity and sense of self? She shared that she writes for vulnerable Latinas with limited Internet access, and that's part of what inspires her work. Is there a person or people that you feel that you write for or are considering and imagining reading your work when you sit down to write?

@bowie · 1yr ago · 0:34

#whyimobsessed

Thank you so much for listening to all of these questions and considering them. I would love to end our conversation by asking, what are you currently obsessed with right now and why? It could be something in relation to your novel or not. It could be a new recipe, an animal, a moment in history, a TV show, whatever

@CDJ · 1yr ago · 1:10

I love Cigar Nunez, her sentences, what she does with syntax. And I really enjoyed Chantelle Johnson's debut novel Posttraumatic last year. I thought it was just wonderful. I also work on a digital archive for Puerto Rican literature, and so I've been interviewing a lot of different Puerto Rican poets. So Puerto Rican literature is my other obsession

@CDJ · 1yr ago · 0:47

That is a really good question. And I often think about myself as a young teenager or young girl who didn't really have a lot of Puerto Rican authors around me. Like, I didn't see that inside the bookstores, for example. And you would have to actively search for those authors and for that literature. And this was obviously before the Internet, where or you could just Google and find the literature

@CDJ · 1yr ago · 1:02

Well, I think first and foremost, you have to write for yourself, and you have to write what you want to write, right, because it will show inside of your story if you're kind of catering or pandering to other people or the market, and you want to be able to surprise yourself. And I think that's what makes really great writing

@CDJ · 1yr ago · 1:51

I mean, you talk about he mentioned failure, and writing inherently requires for you to fail until you figure it out, right? You go through multiple drafts, and that's just part of the process. And in real life, a writer has to work to get their writing out there. And sometimes that's not I mean, for some writers, you see that they automatically get success or their book gets picked up