 I hope some people get a chance to at least barbecue. And also remember, so also we're handling with the coronavirus and the loss of friends we've experienced the last couple of months. So it's a nice thing to remember those and remember the women that served. A little bit about myself. I'm originally from South Texas. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I was going to end up becoming a writer and living in LA and it's been a weird, long journey. Let's see, I guess I got into writing. I was an actor first and I did some acting. I went to school for it. I got his chance to do Kennedy Center Fellowship and during it I wrote like a one-man show and that was like my first go at it and it was okay. It wasn't great. And then I was in New York trying to get an agent and I decided to write a play and star in it. And I thought if I can do that then I could get myself an agent and become famous. So I wrote this play, it was my first play and I was gonna do my first reading of it and my buddy Michael Reyes-Gamilla was the director and he was like, hey man, do you want to have someone else read your part so that way you can hear the play? And I said, sure. He was like, great, there's this guy that's also from the Valley, he's a writer but he does some acting, he can read your part. He's from McAllen, McAllen is the city that's next to PSJA and it's a bit of a rivalry. So it was like, I don't know if I wanna go after McAllen to be reading my part, but okay, so he introduced me to him and his name was Raul Castillo. And so Raul read the play and he was better than I was in the part. So we kinda swapped. I decided it's just stay as a playwright and then he would be the part. And we ended up doing the play for like a year and a half to two years and we called it our grad school. And what's really interesting about it is like the shift it did, cause now Raul is primarily an actor. He still writes, but he's primarily an actor. And I ended up being more of a writer. I still act every once in a while, but I'm more writer. So it's interesting how that all kinda happened. Then how ended up in LA is we were nine years in New York. My wife got pregnant and she, one day it was cold. I think at Snowd and she saw some lady pushing a stroller up the stairs and she was like, that's not gonna happen. We're not gonna do that. I'm not gonna be living here. My family is back West. So I'm moving. If you'd like to come, you're more than welcome. And I guess I didn't have much of a choice. So I ended up moving out here. And the first year was pretty hard. I went back to acting. I didn't have any context. Didn't know what I wanted to do. I had always visioned myself as a playwright or a theater maker. I had these dreams that I'd be working at some East Coast University with the patches on my jacket. So I never thought of actually, or running a theater. Those were two of my dreams. So I never thought of myself as a TV writer. And I lucked out and met a guy who we were on the same season in a show in New York and he took me under his wing. He ended up staffing me and I've been writing on TV ever since. Which brings us back to doing this. So I didn't have any formal training as a writer. I didn't go to a university. I had a couple of opportunities. I studied at HPRL under Eduardo for a year. I did that. And then here, learning again under my mentor, TV mentor, who was a playwright. So we were able to use the same language. He taught me a lot, the approach. And so I was trying to think of like what I could be helpful because I don't do this very much. And nor do I even have thought about a process. So I was really nervous trying to think about like what would be useful and what's my process. And I realized like as an actor, I think character and like going after stuff was pretty easy to me to do as a writer. Like given characters, what was difficult is like building the house, right? Having the tools to be able to like start a story before I get into the stuff. So I think that's, I was like, oh, well, I'll do that. That's what I, that's my first approach. And you know, it's the nuts and bolts. I'm a very pragmatic writer when I start and then I get complex as I go along. I start putting, you know, I start really diving into the character. So I wanted to share with you guys what that is. So the first thing I do, I think, so everybody sees the first page, is it on there? Can people see it? Yeah. So the first thing I do is I write down my goal for the day or the week of the project, right? So like, for instance, I wrote, lead a helpful super friend Zoom chat today. And I put my candle on top of it. And I light it, I have a creativity candle and I light it and I do a little small prayer of like, thanks and acknowledgement of the work I'm about to do and the chance to get to do it. I'm not what you would call a religious person. But what I think I've come to realize in doing this career, that you gotta have a little bit of faith in whatever form that is, because so much is out of your control. And I think it just allows me to honor the theater gods, honor the TV gods, honor the writing gods and the ancestors that came before us and being thankful that we get a chance to do it. So that's as close as I can get to becoming, I guess I'm spiritual in that sense, but it definitely, I wouldn't say that I'm a religious person, but that again helps me at least be thankful and honor and acknowledge the opportunities that I've been given and the people that have helped me and the spirits that guide me. On the last show I was on before this one, I don't know if you, I'm aware of most of you guys know Tanya Saracho, she's very into brujaria. And so she's kind of the one that introduced me into witchcraft and candles and what I admired about it is it at least made me focus on a task, right? I didn't do the whole brujaria thing, but I liked the candles aspect of it. So a lot of what happens in what I'm doing now is people send me books or people ask me things that they're interested in. They're like, hey, are you interested in doing this, writing this? And so it's always interesting to have material come at me to then find inspiration. And I think it's very similar when I think about like plays, if I'm reading an article or I'm trying to think of something I wanna write, it's there's usually a source of some sort. So I thought for today as an exercise, I take the setup of something that came in last week. And so you just take the subject matter what it is and then we'll dive into trying to figure out how to bring it to life. So this one's, let me see if I can read it. There we go. A retired college professor is dealing with the recent loss of her husband of 25 years. As she tries to get on with her new life, she learns that her younger sister has gone missing and her neighbor's field hand has asked for help in finding a place for his pregnant fiance. Now that's just the setup, right? That's the thing we're going to tackle. How do we tell this story? And it's just the facts. This is just the story facts of what happens. So the first things that I like to do is I like to ask myself two questions. What am I investigating and what am I excavating? When I wrote down as an investigate, it's like, think of myself as a journalist, right? Think of the themes that I'm about to tackle in a macro sense. I love this concept of taking a Google map view of something, right? So you Google on it, and you just looking at it from high above. So you can get a broad scope of what it is. For me on this as an example, I came up with grief and identity. That's my macro theme that I'm going to tackle. And what I came up from it is, who am I supposed to be when identity was so dependent on my life with my now deceased partner? So let's take two minutes. I'm gonna take two minutes for you guys to just start thinking about what you would investigate, what you would investigate with this setup. Again, the setup can be anything at play that you're working on or article that you read. But for this exercise, we'll start up with this setup. This is the facts that we're taking and then we're gonna investigate starting now. Okay, quick question. Is it helpful that I provide examples or do you feel like it is influencing the answer? As we go forward because grief and identity, everyone can come up with grief and identity. It's just the one that I came up with. So I wanna make sure if everyone's okay that I keep providing examples as we go forward to clarify or as long as it doesn't influence whatever you're, what you're seeing. What I'm seeing in the chat is that everybody loves the examples. Okay, great, cool, thank you. I'm so nervous. It's the first time I'm ever doing this and like this. So thank you. You can do whatever you want, man, because I think that, yeah, yeah. It's great, thank you. So we'll move on to excavate. So for me, once you start investigating on the big, now you start excavating within yourself, right? You start digging in with yourself. Again, think of it in a broad way. It's a way for you to personalize it and it's a way for you to relate to the theme that you came up with in the investigation. So think of it as a term as a way to dig deeper into yourself. So for me, when I started thinking about grief and identity, the first thing that I could think of was the loss of my dad, right? When that happened to me, that's the thing that I'm going to excavate within myself that connects to the larger theme and the items that I'm investigating. It could be a phrase, it could be a moment in time. It could be something that you're trying to tackle within yourself at this current state of where you're at, but how, again, how it connects to the larger theme. The two minutes and starting now. So after I've done that, the next thing I'd like to move on to is the why me. For me, this is the big one. Out of everyone else in the world, why should it be me? Why is it my voice? Why is it my particular take on the story? I think this is the thing that I struggled again, struggled to find for a while, trying to figure this stuff out. And the difference between excavating and the why me is, the why me is all encompassing. It's your interests, the things that have inspired you, the things that you're reading. It's digging into who you are as a person, the wholeness of you. It doesn't have to be specific to one thing. It's relying on your history as a person and all your experiences and then how you would bring that to the material, to the story. So for instance, for me, when I got this, the first thing I thought about was when I witnessed my mom having to deal with the loss of her husband, right? I have specific memories of, she was 30 years old and my father was a dominant figure within her life and her family and my family. And so when that was taken away, I saw firsthand the struggle she had to do to find a new identity. And what I've noticed is how it relates to me is like, generally most of my work involves death or loss of some sort. So I feel like that's my voice, right? The particular take I have on what it feel like to lose something or someone. And you can write like, just a little five to seven sentence paragraph on the why me. So let's start now. We'll do four minutes on this starting now. Okay, cool. Point of note, we're going through this pretty fast, but I also know that sometimes this, especially this section can take me a couple of days to figure out, like sometimes it happens pretty quick and sometimes I have to really like sit in it for a while to figure out why me? Like why am I the one? So that's supposed to tell this story. So I appreciate the courage you guys are taking, just diving in and doing the exercise. The next thing I move on to is the lead character, right? So we have this woman who's going through the situation where she just lost her husband. She has to deal with her disappearance of her sister and she has to help a neighbor's fiance, right? So the other thing that helps with this is deciding when you're trying to figure out who the character is, is what it's going to be. Is it going to be a drama, a comedy, a dark comedy suspense, a thriller? For me, I tend to find death funny and dark. So what ends up helping me shape of that is the character. Now for this one, I didn't give traits and quirks and flaws because I wanted you guys to, I didn't want to influence this. Didn't give her a name, but you guys can come up with a name, just a couple of traits. I personally don't like doing long paragraphs or big bibliographies of who they are because I'd like that to be discovered as I write. I feel like when they're in situations, the tactics they use tell me a lot about them and I don't want to presume what those will be. So for instance, my character I like, I think, well, she's a storyteller, right? And she's can fly off the handle and then a couple of flaws is like, she's a perfectionist, right? So just little bits and quirks of not to, don't get too deep into it. Like you don't have to say, you know, she likes to put peanut butter sandwiches on Sunday. That's not going to be helpful unless you reach a point in the script that that happens. But, and in the process, once you have that, what do they want and what's the obstacle? Now this goes back to again, the nuts and bolts. And this one's really, was one of the hardest ones for me to fully grasp as far as like feeling confident. Part of it was, it was simple in the sense of like acting, coming from an acting standpoint, like what's my objective? What do I want? What's my spine? Both whatever reason in translation to writing a piece and writing a character, it was hard to be succinct. And the best way I could think about it was thinking of a flow of energy, right? So you have one flow going this way and the other one's constantly going against it. And so whenever I try to come up with what that is, the dramatic paradox, I always just think of those two things, button heads. So for instance, the one we came up with with the show I was working on was, I want justice for my sister, but I don't want to destroy my family in the process. So every time the character was trying to find justice, it was hurting her family. And those were the two things going against. For this, what I came up with was, I want to disentangle myself from my family, my past, without disappointing the ones I love. So every time you make a choice, she makes a choice for herself and her new future. She doesn't want to hurt or disappoint or alienate her family members. So at least for me, as a starting point, it allows me to think of things, put her in situations where that happens, where it's constantly happening. Now this will continually evolve and continually get more succinct and tighter and better as you write. But as a starting point for me to think about, okay, how do I, what's the dramatic paradox? She wants to do this and this is constantly going against her. It's a way for me to start again on a macro level. So for this one, let's write, give her a name, couple of traits, couple of quirks and flaws, and then think about what the obstacle and what they want. Let's do three minutes starting now. All right, the last bit of exercise. Again, a lot of this is just a starting out. I call this, like it's a roadmap and these things will, as you dig into your project or I dig into the Matisse material, they'll get more and more specific. What's cool about some of this stuff that I've, from my experience that I've learned is that whenever I get lost, I'll just go back to this, right? I'm like, oh, what would she do right here? I think, oh, well, this is what she wants. How do I continue to dramatize that? Or well, she has this flaw, you know? And especially important on this next section of what is the story. So we have, again, we have some facts that we've been told. And I stole this from Pixar. So this is a Pixar writing prompt. And it goes, once upon a time, there was your character's name. Every day, they did whatever they did, right? And then one day, something happens. And because of that, they do that. And because of that, do do that until finally blank, right? Now, what I find useful about this is one, you're because of that, because of that, because of that can go on for pages, right? Depending on how big you want the story to be. For me personally, I always like just a paragraph because again, when I get lost, I'm like, what's the story I'm telling again? I can go back to it and it's surprising how much stays as far as like, what happened? Why are they doing what they're doing? What's getting in the way? And how do they resolve it? Because the finishing the story is really hard sometimes. And going in without knowing where you're gonna stop. Sometimes you start, and I know what plays this happens, where like, you let the play write itself, but you get lost because you're like, how does this end? What's the end of this story? So I generally like to do this as a way to like, just get me in my head and what's the story I'm about to tell? And how do I tell it, right? And again, this is where you're writing, your own persona will kick in. Well, whatever you decide to your word choices will let you know like what's the material going to be? What's it gonna look like? What's it gonna feel like as a start? So for this one's gonna be five minutes. Again, sometimes this takes me a couple of days to figure out, but I can see why Pixar is very successful because it really does give you a blueprint of what it's going to be. So let's do five minutes. The last one, starting, no, okay. And we are done. Yay. Thank you, everybody. That was cool. That was cool. You wanna meet the, you wanna see, can you see us all? I'm trying to see if I can do the... Oh, there they are. Oh. Yeah. First of all, it's good to see you again. It's good to see you too. How's the family? All good? Family's good. For everyone else, I got two kids. I got an eight year old and a four year old. And I guess we're going on our 11th week of lockdown. And so basically I was just telling this to a friend of mine, the day depends on whether there wanna be assholes or not. Like, so when they're not assholes, it's a really cool day. When they are assholes, it's a very hard day. So it's like, we're definitely getting to that itchy point of like, how do we change it up? But other than that, like, you know, we're good. We're safe, we're good. Cool. Is this the part where we can ask you questions? Yes, Q and A. Q and A, we got what, 20 minutes left? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a really, I just thought of this question right now. So I'm gonna start and I'm just gonna ask this one question because it's related to like, why should it be you telling the story? Because you worked on shows like Vida. Right. It was a very female-driven, centered drama. And you also worked on Green Leaf, which is a very, you know, sort of spiritual African-American sort of milieu drama, right? How did you get to, how did you get to the point of why me in order to write for those? So for Vida, there was two things that, well, three things, right? One being the culture itself, right? Like we were very, make sure that we, our goal was to make sure that we was very, normalizing the Latin experience, right? So that's the big one. Bringing in our own culture into it. Two, loss, right? They lost the mother. And when I lost my dad, it was me and my brother. So I understood the sibling dynamic of losing and what roles those people take. So like for me, I really related to Emma. I understood who Emma was, what she wanted, what she needed to do. And then part of me, as I grew older, the artistic side, the little, the flailing side was Lynn. So those two parts of me really related to that. And I'm a Gemini. So there's two of me that I always get accused of. The unpredictability of like, you can ask me the question, the same question and you'll get two different answers depending on the time of day. And the big one also was my, so my brother-in-law, his wife, oh, and the, well, that's four actually, now I'm gonna think about it. My brother-in-law, his wife and her sister, they lost a mother and their two personas fit exactly like Emma and Lynn. And the big one on top of all that was the dominating mother, right? Like my mom was a very hard, cold, abrasive woman, blunt woman, and we built her character and Anvita the same way of a brutal blunt, had high expectations and was, we called her an emotional terrorist, right? Like she was an emotional terrorist. Our mothers were emotional terrorists. So those four things, five things made it easy to dive into it, as opposed to thinking like, oh, I'm gonna write this, that's what I brought to it. On Greenleaf, there was one big thing of like, I'm again, trying to normalize the POC's stories, right? One of the things that I try to do is like, I try to add the privilege we bring, that our own social class, our own, you never really see middle class or Americanized Latinos on television that much or people of color. And so I made sure that whenever we were trying to tell stories that the slave narrative, the slave history didn't completely inform everything we made that we did the complete opposite, right? So like, white people don't walk around with this history behind them, they just walk around with a sense of privilege. And so for me, I was like, well, let's think of it that in the same way, like their wealth, their social standings, allow them to enter a room without worrying about their blackness, right? Or my brownness, right? When I enter a room, I talk about sometimes that I forget that I'm Latino until someone points it out, right, other than then I'm just myself. And so there's a sense of privilege I have when I enter rooms. So I wanted to see that on screen. Or like when we go back to Texas. Correct. And that's the other thing too. I grew up in a homogenous environment. It was 98% Latino. I've never not had a brown lawyer, a brown doctor, a brown teacher, a brown engineer, those brown mayor, I saw those things. Now I saw the history to get there. And I was fortunate enough to experience the change of it, but it wasn't outside of my experience. So those two things that I'm trying to think, what other? And story, like I try to consider myself a story person, the basics. So I try to find my niche in that way, trying to figure out like, what's the story? What are we doing? What are we telling? And I feel like that can go anywhere. Like I just got off a horror show and well, how the hell are you writing horror? But the basics are the same for me in that sense. I wanna make sure that we get some questions from the folks who are here to see you. But thank you for all of that. No, thank you. Go ahead, Thea. We've got one from Jose Pereira. We've got your unmuted. Hi, Bondo. I kind of actually, I already answered the question that I had because I'm also from the Valley as well. I'm from Browns, like this section. Oh, nice. I wanted to see how your experiences in the Valley helped shape you as a writer. But I kind of feel like you mentioned that with the homogenous culture. Sometimes I forget myself that I'm Latino as well just because there's so much of that culture around me. But I guess, how does growing up in the Valley affect you as a writer? Well, it's interesting. And I think you're gonna relate to this. I've met two kinds of people from the Valley, from South Texas. And I'm sure maybe this translates to other areas as well. But for me, it's just, again, from my experience. You either hated the Valley or you love the Valley. Like either you wanted to leave and never fucking come back or you wanted to get out, but you wanna come back and make a difference, right? Or you never wanted to leave. I fall in the category that I wanted to leave and I hated the Valley. But that being said, I find myself extremely nostalgic to where I grew up because like one of the biggest lessons early on, so when I went to North Carolina it was a big cultural surprise and shock. And part of it is what people would keep saying, like, hey man, I love you. Or like, I love you. And it was such a shocking thing. Not hearing I love you, which is shocking, but I realized in like growing up in the Valley, when people said I love you, they really meant it and they would never do anything to hurt you. But that means they never told you the truth and they would keep shit from you, right? Whereas like when I learned in North Carolina, that's when they say, I love you, they would still hurt you, but they expect you to forgive them because they love you. And so like that, those kind of little nuances really shaped me and like from being from the Valley and still is in my work of like when I choose for a character to say, I love you, but they're gonna hurt you. Or they choose to say, not say I love you and not do anything to hurt you, but they do dark shit because of it. Family structure was big, you know, my family was, we were a black sheep. But, you know, barbecues, right? Barbecues are really big. So food, food plays a large role in my work because it was so prevalent. Like you're going to eat, you know, going to Red Lobster on Sunday after church, barbecuing those things again from my experience. And then the other thing is like, I think just the fact that, you know, when I try to explain to people what the Valley was, I'll say like, it's just like any Midwestern city, except everyone's brown and they speak Spanish, right? Like in one place, you can have El Pato and then you're gonna have Chipotle in the same thing. Interesting little tidbit about Chipotle, when they first opened up, the workers there changed the salsa recipe to make it more like the Valley, right? Because people didn't like the salsa and then they found out, the headquarters found out and they tried to change it, but the minute they did, people stopped coming. So they went back to the recipe. So the salsa recipe in Chipotle is the only recipe in the whole thing that's different, which I thought was an interesting, but that is the Valley, right? Like that to me is South Texas. Beautiful, our next question is from Krista Gonzalez. You are unmuted. Thank you, and thank you Mando for leading us today. I have a question about, is how you're thinking about how we tell stories, shifting at all, now that we can't for 11 weeks, we're not able to be in the same room with people we relate to and care about. And do you think that this will continue to inform your work in the coming months? That's a great question. It's definitely something that's being tackled in our industry and in the art form. I saw the Our Lady of 121st, the Reading Lab, and it was interesting how some of it was still extremely powerful and some of it was really weird. I'm not sure how I feel about Zoom as a media telling stories. I think tackling the first one, I've noticed that I'm more interested in genre because of what's going on right now. I was already drifting that way using genre as a social means. I think first one was get out. Get out was really like inspirational. And then I realized like the other thing I'm realizing is a lot of times in order to get your message across if you want a social or political stem, you need the box, right? Like what's the box? People want to know what the box is. So like with get out, it was horror. Horror was the means by tackling a social issue and genre allows you to do that. And the other thing is like I think about my kids. One of the things my mentor told me, which is great, I still use it today. It's like when they grow up and they look over at daddy's work, like what do you want them to know about you? So I think about that. Like I think about, I tell my daughter's stories and my son, he loves mystery stories. We do, I created this character called Danny the dinosaur and he involves himself in some mysteries because he's into Scooby-Doo. So I think about that like, oh, how do we tell the mystery? Cause I don't see that from a brown perspective mystery, right? Like a fantasy, knights and dragons. Like where's our witcher? Where's our game of thrones? I think of that. That's how it's influenced me currently. Thank you. Very cool. Our next question is from Giselle. Hey, you're unmuted. Great, thank you, Fia. Hi, Manga. Hi, Giselle. Thank you so much for today's class session. I live in the Bay Area right now. I'm a director, but since quarantine started, I kind of like dove into writing and this feels very exciting to me. And I have for a while been thinking like, I wanna move back to my hometown, which is LA. But I feel resistance at the same time, but I'm like, oh, cool. Like there's so many writers in LA and maybe that's something I could go after. So I'm just wondering if you could talk about like any writing communities in LA or just like how to be a new writer in LA. I mean, that's a great question. Yeah, I think that's a great question. There's great support out here. That was the surprising aspect. Theater, there was a lot of theater companies out here, theater groups on the writing side. And then there's fellowships, right? Like there's a lot of fellowship opportunities. Nalip is a great organization that provides support for Latino writers. How do you spell it? N-A-L-I-P, I think it's National Alliance of Latino Independent Producers, but they go by Nalip. They have some great programs. Yeah, I think the move to LA, my wife is from the Bay Area. I love the Bay Area. I think the Bay Area is fantastic. I think when people ask me if they want to move to LA, I think it's to start out thinking like what's ultimately your goal, like what do you want? Because like, but you grew up here. So that's an interesting thing of coming back. But there's definitely places to find support and grow your writing. I know a friend of mine just finished the UCLA writers program, the professional writers program. And what was cool about it is she was able to find a little community of writers that she could bounce her work off of. They all shared the same experience, the same language. So together they were able to grow as writers and end the profession. You know, someone says, hey, they're looking for writer's assistant or literally it's looking for someone to read stuff materials. They became a little hub of information. And I think that's really kind of the key out here. And the same when New York, I would say it's like finding your people, finding your hub and there's, you know, they're here. There's many of people that do that. Great thing about LA is like, if you want to put something up, there's plenty of people available to help you. That's cool. That's so comforting to hear. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Well, and just all M and LA, if you're looking for a writing buddy, I'm always here. Yes. I'm very excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See where it started. And X Bay area. So, what up? Next question we have is from Rose. You are, who? I made it. Hey, Rose. Hey, Mandel. Hey. Thank you so much for the workshop. So I wanted to ask you, and I really appreciated you giving us, like you said, a box of structure, a really, you know, point by point. And I'm wondering there's so many ways, you know, to attack a place, so many ways to skin a goat or whatever. So, what part do you find is the like, the inspiration, what do I want to say? When you go to the right side of your brain, like for me, sometimes I'm starting a play, sometimes it's just the image. So I had an image of an ankle bracelet on this woman. And I thought, okay, then she's a single mom, on and on and on and on. But you're right, I get myself into a problem when I'm just writing by, I get this huge sensory input. And sometimes it could be just, sensory input, and sometimes it could be a taste or smell or whatever. So I'm wondering, do you have a time when you like stick that in there, that what is just the sensory, the creative right side of the brain into this wonderful box that you've given us? And I think boxes are also, I love a blank slate because it, you know, if you have structure in it, you can get really creative. I'm just wondering, is that as a starting process, is when do you find that right brain kicking in? Do you plan for it, I guess, is my question? Yes, yes, so to answer your question, there's two things to it. One, I came the other way, like you're saying, I came from a nebulous space to learning how to wrap structure around it. Because a lot of times I find myself, and like I read my early plays, and like I see where I'm like, okay, that's where it wasn't strong writing for me, right? Like where I failed in some of these things. I think what two things happen, when I do this part, I also do where I just sit here and like let my mind flow and images pop up, right? And so I'll put on the wall like, oh, I'd love to see this scene. I'd love to see that scene or this moment. So I'll have like 10, 15 little pieces of paper on my wall of moments that I would love to see happen. And then what I try to do is, if I'm lost, I'll pull that moment in and connect it to the structure. And the other thing that ends up happening a lot. So like a lot of my like creative work happens when I'm sleeping. So by my nights then I have a little book and I write my notes. But I let the dreams tell me what to do. And so I'll write it down. And then in the morning, I'll try to recall the dream and recall the image or recall the story or recall the experience. And then I'll let that infuse to work. And then of course reading, you know, you read articles, books, books, I like to read books so they'll help me at least get out of my head. But if something I'm reading triggers something, I'll put the book down and I'll go and write. Music, I always write with music because again, trying to tap into that side. But the big things are in just the process is once I do this story, the one day, once upon a time thing, I think about like the images I'd like to see. And sometimes they are like a bracelet on an ankle. And I would love to see that. It's like putting peanut butter on a slice of bread. I wanna see that. She gets in a fight with her sister. I wanna see that. These are little moments that happen where I might just let my mind wander. Very cool. Our next question is from Tamara. I will unmute you. We do also have a question. Are you, would you consider sharing your PowerPoint with us? Oh, yes. Yeah. Wonderful. Go ahead and send it to me. Okay. I will post it in the HowlAround page where we, and it may also be able to go out with Taluk's email. But final question, Tamara, you are unmuted. Okay. Hi. So my question was, I've always wanted to like get started writing. That's why I've been like taking all these Zoom workshops. But I kind of feel like I'm in this spot. I mean, I just graduated like last week. So I'm in this spot where I feel like I don't have enough experience. Thank you. I don't have enough experience, I guess, to write. And I kind of feel like I don't know where to start. So I was wondering if you had any advice for like people like me who are kind of in this spot where we're like, I don't know what to do but I know I want to do something. You mean creating material or? Yeah. Well, one, I don't, you know, I would unlock the I don't have enough experience, right? Because you've already lived this long and I'm sure your heart's been broken. I'm sure you've pissed people off. I'm sure you've gotten in fights. Like we're actually pretty basic as human beings. You know, it's like our experiences we've got rebranded the gamut. So the key will be sometimes it's just there's two things either tap into you start thinking about those some of those moments and like what they do or you go out and you experience things, right? Like you travel, you spend, you know like someone was asking me what I wish I could do if I could go back and I'd like to make more mistakes. I'd like to get in trouble more. I'd like to travel more. I'd like to read more. I think this is the time right now to start collecting those things. So if there's like, you know if there's something you're excited about but you feel like you don't, example I just finished writing something completely different than what I wrote. And it reached a point in the process after my first note session where I realized the pilot that I was writing was smarter than I am. It just was smarter and hence why I wasn't able to crack it. So what it made me do is have to start forcing me to be as smart as it and find things that I found that inspired me that were as smart, right? And letting those things like without that filter block me because a lot of it is like self doubt. Oh, I'm not capable of do this. So I had to like go through whatever, you know process or like constantly remind myself like, oh, I'm enough, I can do this. I'm grateful for this. And whatever excited me about it, again, finding a way to tap into it for myself allowed me to at least start figuring out the puzzle because I didn't have the writing experience to tell that story. But the material, the life was there for me to tap into it. And, you know, Eduardo talked about this. I think part of Fornez's teachings were like, there's a universal well that as artists we can tap into that's what makes us artists. A lot of her work was allowing us to be able to, or I should say when I got it secondhand cause I guess it was Eduardo's interpretation of that was to be able to allow ourselves to tap into that universal well. And you're more than capable of doing that. You're more than capable of going there past lives and past histories and universal pain and universal experiences. But also I would make mistakes, travel a little more, read more, don't feel a rush to like try to get it right right now. You're not supposed to, you know, but you are, you know, this is the moment to learn. Thank you. Outside of school, outside of school. I would say fall in love like 30 times before you're 30. That's what I would say. Oh, fall in love, break somebody's heart, have your heart broken, all that, like that stuff is good stuff. It sucks when it's good stuff. Yeah. Amando, we're past the hour. So I wanted to say thank you. This has been really great. It's so great to see you, but I have one really important question. Okay. It's in and out or water burger? Water burger, water burger. Totally. Are you kidding me? It can't be it. Number five bacon, toasted bun. I'm just going to end this call now. You know why? Because in and out they're french fries. They suck, man. They're good when you have them but they don't reheat well. They don't carry well. Who wants to reheat? Their fries are not great. Their fries are not great, fresh. Unless you get them animal style. And that, All right. One day when I go back to Texas, I want to try it. Oh, water burger. It can't be it. It's a water burger. It's a what? A burger. Dude. Thank you so much. I will catch up with you at some point, Ian. But it was great to see you. I'm glad your family is healthy and safe and we're, I am not from Valley, but as a fellow, as a fellow at Chicano, I'm really proud of you and all the work you're doing and you're an inspiration. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm here. I'm so sorry. I told Herbert I would unmute him. Herbert, you're on mute. Oh, Herbert has a question. I don't want to go one last. You're going to talk to us. Bring us home. Bring us home. Flash. I know. There we go. No, I just talk about inspiration. No, Mando. Thank you for, thank you for sharing your, your way of outlining and structuring plays. I'm really happy to see a lot of young Latinx writers today. And please join my class, June 3rd, because I'm going to emphasize a lot about structure, structure, structure, structure. I read about 50, 60 Latinx plays a year because I work at the San Diego Rep and I help choose their season. And you know, there's beautiful writing, there's poetic writing, everything's fine, but what we're lacking in there is structure. And unfortunately, you're not going to get produced unless you follow a certain structure that people comprehend and are comfortable with. And that's just the reality. And so join my class if you want to get produced. I love it. June 3rd. June 3rd. Yeah. Yeah, so this, yeah. So Friday is Martin Zimmerman. You might know him from Ozark, but then we have Herbert on Monday. So Mando, thank you for taking time and during your holiday day. I know this holiday is kind of weird this year, but... It's weird, man. It's weird. We're going to end up making a short film about the three little pigs right now, I think. What are they? That's what the kids wanted to do. Make sure you're posted on TikTok or whatever you use. Yeah. All right, thank you. Thank you, guys. Take care. Bye, everyone.