I Suspect My Dad Raised Me to Rewrite His Book: On Harnessing Words of Dis/Encouragement

The story that would eventually become The Music of Pedro long preceded my interest in writing, or even my ability to read. My dad says it’s been in the works one way or another for at least thirty years.

Until I met my fourth-grade teacher, I was saying I wanted to be a veterinarian or a zoologist, so if my dad had imagined one of his seven children helping him write his book one day, he has an effervescent woman with long brown hair, a great reading voice, and fun stories from home to thank for that child being me.

Discovering My First Writer’s Workshop

My teacher sectioned off a corner of the classroom and called it The Writing Workshop. Something about what she was doing made the local paper. A few of her students were highlighted and I’m honored that my name exists in print somewhere at my parents’ house next to this gem (which is still crystal in my mind after 22 years):

Pizza, pizza, I love you

I want to do the things you do

Crunchy munchy oh so good

Pizza belongs in Hollywood

It’d be the star of every show

Make fans of everyone I know

Crunchy munchy wonderful pizza

Reb Cuevas, 4th grade

Another I remember writing around that time, which may have been the first I wrote outside of a school assignment, was an ode to Halloween:

On Halloween night

I’m filled with fright

And try to find someplace to hide me

But when I’m safe in my bed

And have nothing to dread

I have my candy bag right beside me

Reb Cuevas, 4th grade

My fourth-grade teacher was the first to encourage my writing and from there my family took over. As I grew older and kept writing, my mother envisioned me as a future Sheri Dew while my dad became my mentor. I took my writings to him as a preteen—often presumptuous, ill-executed attempts to handle topics well outside my wheelhouse, and he eviscerated them. In other words, he was frank. His feedback often made me cry, but what stuck was how seriously he was taking me. He pushed me to improve.

Using My Young Writing for Ill

I have a miraculously good relationship with my two younger brothers, given what it had to survive as kids. I’ve never really watched The Three Stooges, but my mom would tell me all the time that I was Moe. Who my brothers were didn’t matter, because Moe abused them both. I was mean. Mostly it was physical but at least once I took pencil to paper to really bring home the pain.

After some kind of scuffle with the brother right below me in age, now the artist Saint Down, I wrote him a letter, dramatically delivered of course and the contents made him cry. All I can remember of it was that I’d told him to go back to hell where he came from. Cue my dad seeing the letter.

“That’s it!” he said. “You don’t deserve my help with your writing!”

As a middle-class kid living a blessed life in a good neighborhood, occasions for heartbreak were few. I had nothing to compare to the devastation of losing a family pet, for example, but this came close.

Eventually I did stop taking my writing to my dad, but I don’t recall if this was the moment. I’m sure he softened up, as he was prone to do, and continued coaching me through a litany of rote descriptions and stilted dialogue. After all, there was a novel in him that would need polishing eventually and he had at least twenty years to craft me into someone capable and willing.

But I’d certainly stopped sharing my writing with him by the time I was a teenager. Doing so would have only embarrassed us both.

Gimme that Hot Hot Fantasy and Paperback Erotica

Romance became my genre of choice for both reading and writing, though I never did attempt to mimic the erotica I read on the sly. Kissing scenes were thrilling and frightening enough to approximate at my keyboard as I was still years away from firsthand experience—He held her like a dried leaf remains one of my favorite best-guess descriptions from my teenhood.

From about thirteen to eighteen, I was an antisocial wall-clinger working with my orthodontist to correct a cross-bite, my endocrinologist to get a handle on a faulty maturation process, and my dermatologist to mitigate the effects of hormonal pit-acne. Your typical teenage woes. Reading was escapist and my writing was wish-fulfilling, echoing my cavorting pulp-fic library finds while centering a beautiful brown heroine who was always named Saphira and always underestimated.

I found a new mentor and co-writing-conspirator in my cousin, whose heroine was always named Shiara and always the wiser and more responsible sister in our magical duo. We wrote ourselves into exciting situations that mirrored the stories we’d weave with our Barbies before writing became our preferred pastime.

We spent countless weekends through junior high and high school taking turns at the computer in her basement and abusing a printer that had probably seen its heyday in the 80s. It fed on paper that came in a continuous sheet of perforated pages and the ink was blue-black. We accomplished dozens of feet of meandering story, enough that my uncle was inspired to tell us we were wasting our time.

“Do you know what the odds are that you’ll actually get published?” he asked us.

If he offered up any numbers for our consideration, I don’t remember them, but I took his meaning to heart and so many years later, I thank him for his words of discouragement.

Harnessing Words of Discouragement

Whether my uncle was hoping to buy less printer paper or redirect our time toward more practical/typical teenage amusements, I don’t know. But his words were timely. They provoked me to introspect at a formative age. I didn’t know the odds he referred to precisely, but I gathered they were against me. Yet the suggestion that I should stop writing was uncomfortable. It had already become something that I needed to do, not a decision I was making every time I compulsively opened my notebook or sat at a keyboard. But of course I wanted to be published one day.

Much of what I was reading voraciously at the time could be called uninspired, but it scratched an itch, gave me something to mimic, and it was published. I wanted more than anything to do what those authors had done and smell my own words mixed with that pulp potpourri. I decided that the only way to be 100% sure I’d never have the chance was if I never wrote again. So I never stopped.

***

On October 6, 2015, I opened my first acceptance email from an incredible journal and proved my uncle wrong, something I intend to keep doing for as long as possible. My next publication and first novel will be The Music of Pedro, co-authored by my dad Sergio A.C. Pizano and illustrated by my brother Saint Down.

We’re self-publishing digitally, but now we’re planning on doing a limited print exclusively for the launch party that will be held in Utah on Friday, November 8th, 2019. Save the date! I’ll roll out more details over the next few months. Subscribe for updates to go straight to your inbox!