“We must write that first sentence and then the next, and the next, and so on.” —Alex Temblador
On Saturday, January 17, Alex Temblador will teach “Write Your Book This Year.” By breaking down the major elements of writing a novel or book – characters, setting, research, plot, character development, outlines, and planning – this class aims to put writers on the path to success as they set out on beginning a new book.
Alex Temblador is the award-winning author of Writing An Identity Not Your Own, Half Outlaw, and Secrets of the Casa Rosada. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma and has had creative works published in PALABRITAS, Colorado Review, D Magazine, Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America, and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology. When Alex is not writing her next novel, she’s working as a travel, culture, and products journalist or teaching writing classes at literary organizations, schools, and festivals. You can find more about Alex’s books, classes, and events at AlexTemblador.com.
Here’s what Alex had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
My earliest writing influences were books and stories with magical and/or historical elements, that featured girl or women heroines. I was obsessed with the Alanna series by Tamora Pierce, Nancy Drew, and the Royal Diaries series as a child.
When I got older, I dove even further into YA and adult fantasy and sci-fi, though funnily enough, I recall being very moved by The Handmaid’s Tale and The Count of Monte Cristo in high school. I loved the structure and surprise twists in The Count of Monte Cristo, and how even though it was written in the 1840s, it was much more direct in its language, making it more accessible to mass audiences than other works of fiction at the time. As for The Handmaid’s Tale, it showed me how storytelling can be used to bring societal issues to the forefront.
In grad school, I went through another influence era when I finally was introduced to magical realism. Prior to then, I didn’t even realize that I’d only read one book – in high school – written by a Latine author (for reference, I’m Mixed Latine). I had a professor in grad school who introduced me to magical realism by Latino authors, and I fell in love with Ana Castillo, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories, and more. My first two novels were magical realism, and I think in those novels you can see how my earliest influences shaped me as a writer.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
I had a lot of difficulty writing fiction between 2021 and 2025. During that time, I got a publishing deal for my third book, Writing An Identity Not Your Own, so I had to take a lot of time away from fiction to write that nonfiction writing craft guide. When I tried to write fiction again, I decided that I wanted to return to my roots as a writer and discover “the fun” of writing. I wanted my work to be playful and exciting for me, especially after years of writing literary fiction and nonfiction that tackled personal traumas and issues.
This was easier said than done. Not only was I more mindful about how I was writing characters with identities different from my own – and so writing a lot slower – but I was writing with genre elements (like sci-fi, fantasy, and thriller) that I’d either never written before or hadn’t written in 15 years. I remember showing my literary agent some early pages and she was quite baffled because my writing style wasn’t on par with what I’d been writing before.
I felt like I was a new writer again, standing on wobbly legs and having to learn everything that I thought I already knew. That said, I was having a blast with experimenting and writing new types of stories. Finally, this year, I completed a novel. When I submitted it to my literary agent, I realized that I hadn’t completed a novel since 2021. I’m so proud of myself for going slow and taking the time to fall in love with storytelling again. Most of all, I discovered that young teenage passion that I used to have for writing fiction. I truly believe that taking that long fiction writing break and experimenting with new kinds of storytelling was exactly what I needed to guide my writing career forward.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
One of the most rewarding parts of being a writer is connecting with other writers. I love talking about literature, story, and themes, and now I’m friends with people who love the same thing and are willing to nerd out on obscure writing stuff for hours. I’ve been able to meet writers from all different types of backgrounds, which has inspired me in a multitude of ways. For instance, I’m a poet now because I made poet friends. I never had any interest in poetry until those friendships flourished. Now, with a writing craft book on the market, I get to talk to new, aspiring, and established writers about craft, character building, plot, and more.
Who do you write for?
Part of me writes for myself – because I need to get the story out and mold it into whatever it’s supposed to be. That being said, I know that a lot of the writing I do is not for myself. As a woman of color who has broken through and become a traditionally-published award-winning author, I have some privilege and I choose to use it to help marginalized communities.
Often, I write the stories I wasn’t provided as a Mixed Latine child and adult, in the hope that other people with similar backgrounds as myself will see themselves in my stories and feel represented and understood. Other times, I write to inspire women, to think about the boxes that society or our family has placed us in and to consider alternate paths for our lives. Sometimes, I write to my white family members, in the hope that they’ll better understand how their unconscious biases impact their brown family members such as myself. And when it comes to my nonfiction writing craft book – I write to teach those in the publishing world and aspiring or established writers to reconsider how we tell stories and whether those methods benefit or hurt readers, other authors, and society at large.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
As writers, we often find ourselves too frozen by our ideas to actually put pen to paper. In this course, you’ll learn about all the things you’ll need to think about when it comes to writing a book. However, my hope is that I teach you to make mistakes. By that I mean, to give yourself the permission to write something bad, a plot that doesn’t make sense, even a flat character – just as long as you’re writing. I want to teach writers that how we begin writing a novel is not how we finish a novel, and that in the future, we can look to editing as a means of fixing all of our mistakes, but first we have to make mistakes. To do that, we must start. We must write that first sentence and then the next, and the next, and so on.
—
Thanks, Alex!
Click here to learn more about Alex’s upcoming class.
