Every writer obsessed with psychology discovers words within words.

Always master yourself, your subject matter, your medium, and your audience--in that particular order.

To improve your penmanship, think word by word as you write rather than of an entire sentence or paragraph.

Before writing, consider the entire sentence or paragraph, then descend from the macroscopic to the microscopic level.

Since a playwright is a thinker of society, he/she must always be inclusive and never exclusive.

If your readers cannot comprehend your first few sentences, they will read no further and abandon you.

We write and we paint to partially describe, with each work, the dream life that we have, hoping to complete its description with our oeuvre before we die, and hoping that it will be a good legacy to leave to those who can step back and comprehend all of it in its entirety.

When writing a play, don't just write. Visualize.

A vision is nothing if it is not put into words or pictures.

Writing from The Heart Workshop For TheatreWorks Singapore (May 29 - June 4, 2017)

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Never write, rewrite, or revise a play before bedtime. It will give you insomnia

It is always difficult to rewrite and revise a play because, in doing so, you go through all of the emotions in the play all over again.

A playwright must always write from a state of emotion, because emotion is the foundation of dramatic dialogue.

That is why in a workshop, after an emotional truth exercise, I immediately lead the participants into a writing session.

Everyone who is prone to road rage should try it. It is an effective way of taking emotion to a higher level by means of the defense mechanism sublimation.

The writing on the wall can always be revised.

When inflamed with anger and you want to calm down, write with a blue pen.

The literal has no meaning until you look beyond it.

A writer without passion is a beautiful kite without wind.

There is nothing like black ink, especially very black ink, though you should keep other colors in reserve for stimulus and for variety.

Always have a notebook on hand to write your random thoughts and ideas in, rather than hope they come back when you need them. They never will come back. They are all brought about by historicity, the time, the place you are in, and what you are feeling at the moment. Like water passing under a bridge, those thoughts and ideas will never be the same even if they occur to you again.

Like the only way to enjoy painting, the only way to enjoy writing is to not do one project after another.

It is also the only way to enjoy good chocolate.

There is no such thing as forgetting a dream. When you wake up and cannot recall the narrative and the imagery, first inspect how you are FEELING, for that is always the key to every dream. It is the first message that your psyche sends you in the dream state--and sometimes it is the only message.

Go with the feeling. Write a poem or three-paragraph story WITHOUT CONSCIOUSLY AUTHORING ANYTHING SENSIBLE AND JUST LETTING THE WORDS FLOW. What you have written is a variation of your dream, and can be interpreted as such.

And this is, as a mater of fact, how many great works begin.

Again, a reminder to use mahjong tiles or building blocks to create a model of your stage space as you are writing your play. Keep the structure on your writing desk until you finish writing your play. You may of course make changes and adjustments to your stage as you continue writing.

The model stage prevents you from thinking in terms of cut-to-cuts and close-ups, and compels you to think instead of entrances and exits, upstage, center stage, downstage, stage left, stage right, diagonals, cycloramas (if you want one), and what is hidden backstage and in the wings.

Don't just develop one talent--develop two or more. You will find that they feed each other.

Draw a person as best you can. Note that your skill in anatomy as an artist is always the equivalent of your perception of character when you write about a person.

If your literary depiction of a person is shallow or sketchy, try developing your drawing skills in anatomy. Begin with the skeletal system, and, when you have mastered that, progress to the muscular system. Be mindful of light, shadow, and three-dimensional rendition (a.k.a. "roundness").

Afterward, write about a person and note the improvement in your psychological understanding of that person.

It's all about powers of observation. And if you tell me that you are not interested in drawing human beings, why should I believe you when you say that you are interested in writing about them?

Write to change a reader's life, not a reader's mind, and know the difference between the two.

After writing and polishing your work, never ask yourself how it would come out had you done it another way. Your what-if work will not only lack spontaneity, it will also come out as over-written.

The FIRST version that emerges from your psyche will always be the most truthful one.

Any attempts to redo it will be your subconscious, defense mechanisms' efforts to disguise truth.

Tony Perez's Art of War: Like an arrow in a quiver, keep silent until you need to be used.

A hundred years from now, who will care what your particular preferences were?

Fear is always a herald of the new.

A constant lack of clarity in your works is always an indication that you fear not having enough depth, and that you would rather that your works be misunderstood than be judged as being trite.

Shake off that fear. Everything you say is important because no other writer will ever say it the way you can and the way you do.

An artist finds solitude even in companionship.

Obsessive-compulsive writers believe they are not worthy of writing in beautiful and expensive notebooks.

Know that it is not the perfection of your penmanship that counts but the quality of your thoughts.

When uncertain as to what you should paint, place your canvas upright at the base of a tree. The shadows of branches and leaves will fall on the canvas and suggest visual images.

When uncertain as to what you should write, sit in front of a tree, look up at its branches and leaves, and contemplate their patterns. Look down at your notebook and go with the first association that comes to your mind.

An Exercise In Developing Dialogue

Record a normal conversation. Transcribe it on paper if necessary.

1) What is the objective of each person in the conversation?

2) Mark the twists and changes that each person in the conversation takes.

Now REWRITE the conversation as dialogue in a play, keeping in mind that the dialogue in every scene in a play must push the premise forward.

3) After deciding what the premise of each person in the conversation is, DELETE all irrelevant passages from the conversation.

4) Rewrite the conversation so that each line pushes its speaker's premise. Be aware of dramatic economy and cross out everything superfluous, i.e., any idea that has already been articulated.

5) Now read through the rewritten conversation. Do emotions play a role in the conversation? If they do, EXAGGERATE each emotion--merely as an exercise--in the conversation.

Reread your work. You have just written a passage of dialogue.

Write and paint as though there's no tomorrow.

Good literature is a magnifying lens of reality.

To every creative and observant person, each day brings at least three pleasant surprises--and most especially to every artist, for an artist is not an artist if nothing surprises him any longer.

At the end of each day, recall and reflect on your three pleasant surprises.

Write and paint not to sell but to change the lives of others.

When you write and when you paint, ask yourself if your work has value not only to yourself and to your country but also to the rest of the world.

Know that "self-expression" is a grade-school and high-school rationale that artistic maturity and evolution always leave that behind.

Whenever you write something, you leave a piece of yourself on what you wrote on.

Thank God that you are infinite, and, because you are infinite, you are inexhaustible.

Write a portrait, draw a face description.

A writer never rises in the morning and wonders what the day will bring him.

To the extent that it is possible, a writer authors his day.

And he succeeds in doing so especially if he has mastered lucid dreaming.

Even pornography must have a thought-out and effective narrative.

There is no real difference between composition in painting and composition in creative writing, that its why it is beneficial to you to practice both.

To infuse your work with dramatic urgency, write your story not from the beginning but from the middle, then develop and push it forward WITHOUT resorting to flashbacks.

Always write for readers who are 30 years old and above. Your work then becomes truly timeless.

The artist who becomes truly immortal will always be the artist who takes pride in aging.

Write from your heart, never from your producer's or your publisher's cash register.

Every writer has a phenomenological frame of reference, but he/she must consider his audience's general frames of reference at all times. Otherwise he/she will be terribly misunderstood, and, when this occurs, it is always the writer's fault because he/she communicated first.

The artist who exercises true powers of observation is seldom engrossed with his gadgets, for he is constantly attuned to the world without and to the world within.

It's Love

Go through an entire day with the mindset that you love everything--everyone you see, everything you do, everyone you meet.

At the end of the day, write your insights in your notebook.

What's In A Name?

Choose a name you've seldom encountered, preferably one you cannot associate with a real person. For example, "Corinne" or "Maksim", whatever your gender.

On a day and a night that you are mostly alone, use that name for yourself, going about your day and your night as though that were indeed your name.

You will find, among other things, that:

--You will have a different color sense.
--You will develop different preferences for food.
--Your penmanship will change.
--Your behavior will also change.

This is, actually, the process of "possession". And what is a writer, after all, but a person being possessed by the current character he or she is writing about?

Note: Heighten your powers of observation during this exercise, and always in the service of creative writing, rather than merely going through the experience just for fun.

Purple is a complex color because it is a tertiary comprised of a myriad of mixes, not just blue and red. That is why, very often, no two pieces of purple clothing, bought separately, match. There will almost always be a clash of tints, hues, and shades.

See how the color purple applies to your sentences in a paragraph.

Be and become an artist, and that is good enough for the present and for posterity. You don't even have to be popular or highly acclaimed.

Being and becoming. Know those words and their meanings well.

It is poetry that sets us high above everything else, yet I wonder whether other creatures have poetic thoughts but not the language to express them to us.

An artist should be sensitive in that he should use all of his powers of observation in exploring Nature, society, and himself.

Yet, he should not be sensitive in the sense that he is easily offended by others and closed to all kinds of criticism.

A Writer's Quirk

I am certain that only I experience this, that, when my keyboard is on my lap rather than on the keyboard stand, I feel more connected to my writing. The physicality of bearing the weight of the keyboard on my thighs and the rhythmic strokes that I feel as I tap on the keys, makes me merge, somehow, with what I am writing.

Make your painting feed your writing. Then make your writing feed your painting.

Finishing my novel and posting it in cyberspace must be somewhat like bringing to term and giving birth to a baby. There is a sudden feeling of fulfillment and of pride, quickly followed by a feeling of emptiness that verges on depression for the psychologically weak. During this dark time of stillness there is a compulsion to write again--in the same manner that a painter refuses to set down his brush lest his loss of momentum be perceived as a form of failure or of death. It is a fear of being infertile or sterile.

As for myself, it is always a time to rest and have fun. I spend that time hanging out with my children and grandchildren, or going shopping, or enjoying my house, or being around my antiques, or looking through my jewelry and my treasured collections and my favorite books and my DVDs.

After giving birth to a baby, after all, one doesn't rush to make another baby.

This is why I live. Not for the moments of writing and painting, but for the moments of resting and having fun.

Yet, almost no one seems to understand that.

I wrote the last line of my novel, and my mind took me back to the time I wrote the first, tentative line. And rewrote it. And rewrote it some more, until it sounded right to me. The first line is Alpha, the last, Omega. In between, an entire world of births and deaths and comedies and tragedies.

Perhaps that is how every person's life is. We are fortunate that the Creator has the supreme intelligence to rewrite every line along the way, as necessary and as is best for each and every one of us.

Take care not to write constantly, as you must take care not to paint constantly.

Stop. Rest. Recharge. Have fun in life, because, as you will learn soon enough, that is the point--not writing or painting.

Note that those who write and paint constantly simply keep repeating themselves and, the more they do, the more their works get devalued.

Fill cyberspace with your very mind and your very heart, for it is the writer in cyberspace, not the writer in print, who will be truly immortal.

In mid-year this year Y. sent me a pan review of his new play and electronically cried on my shoulder. I replied, "My dear Y., when someone criticizes your play, the sweetest form of revenge is to write three more."

That is what I do with every novel, play, essay, poem, or Google+ and facebook posting that I write. When people say that they don't like it, I deliberately write three more.

It is the prolific writer who is always the victor. A hundred years from now, everyone will remember you, not your critics.

If you are a writer, write three more. And more. And more. If you are selling a product, sell three thousand more. And more. And more.

Drama is not about ideologies, political issues, and grandiose, spectacular affairs. It is about the simplest relationships between human beings.

A true, creative writer never runs out of ideas because knows how to attune his personal mind to the cosmic mind.

When a reader comes upon a piece of writing he is enamored with, he wishes to see the author's photo.

Yet, when you see a photo of a person you are enamored with, you do not wish to see his writing.

We fall in love with faces and with bodies more than we fall in love with minds.

Always have a second penmanship--one that only you can easily decipher and that cannot be comprehended by "sightdroppers"--people looking over your shoulder.

The worst readers of all are those who tell writers what to write and how to write it.

To improve your handwriting, practice writing big if your penmanship is small and practice writing small if your penmanship is big.

Do not abhor being haunted by unpleasant memories. Instead, learn how to burn them as creative fuel to propel your art.

The Truth Is Not Out There.

It Is Within You.

"The werewolf bit you, and you are mine forever."
--Tony Perez

Congratulations to Pamela Tham (_Waiting for Marimekko_), who won First Prize under the Open Category in the recent 24-Hour Playwriting Competition sponsored by TheatreWorks Singapore! Congratulations also to Clara Chow (_Birth Days_) and Jason Montes (_Gigantocmachy_), who won Merit awards under the same category! 

Pamela, Clara, and Jason were my students in the _Writing from The Heart_ workshops I conducted in Singapore.

Practice writing in a place that provides many distractions. First merge with your surroundings, and then write. The more you do this, the more you will be able to write without having to isolate yourself. You will also eventually discover that your writing takes on additional dimensions, because your mind connects not only with your personal unconscious but with the Collective Unconscious.

Never conduct the same workshop twice. Otherwise you will eventually get bored with your own exercises.

My writing habits are quite eccentric. I begin passages on Word and keep rewriting them until I have the right point of attack. Then I switch to writing with my dragon pen in a dedicated notebook. I encode that and continue writing on Word again. I switch regularly between computer-encoding and writing in cursive. It gives me the best of both writing sensations.

It is like living my current lifetime and simultaneously reliving a past lifetime.

When starting out a novel, write your first two pages, set them aside, and come back to them a day later to see if your lines sound right. If they don't--if they are stilted and the lines don't flow--it is because you are writing it in the wrong language. Switch to another language, such as Chinese, Bahasa, Hindi, or Tagalog.

If you INSIST on writing your novel in a preferred language, talk to yourself in a running monologue in that language while you are alone in your room. When you think your thoughts, think in that language. Only then should you resume writing your novel.

If you are a serious writer, and if you are truly nationalistic, it is your duty to ensure that your readership extends beyond the border of your own country.

When the heart looks back, it sees its love projected to all four corners of the earth, and unto the sky.

The heart seeks shelter when it rains.

When writing, have in your presence as many colors as possible. They serve as a visual palette. Some items that work are a jar of multicolored candy, a vase filled with crayons, or a bowl of glass pebbles.

What You Cannot See, You Can Feel

I've been knitting for more than 30 years now. While working on projects I noted that the yarn I used had a unique texture depending on what color it was. Pink yarn, for example, feels sticky to me, while red yarn feels rough and sandy. I asked my mother and my sisters if they noticed the same thing, but they said that they did not, or that they did not bother to, and so I kept quiet about it for some time.

In 2013, while I was teaching creative writing in my "Writing from The Heart" workshop at the Philippine National School for the Blind, I remembered my knitting and introduced a new exercise. I asked the participants to peel the paper covers off every crayon in their boxed sets. I then placed one crayon of the same color in their hands, a color at a time, and asked them to feel it while thinking of specific associations. I even allowed them to smell and lick each crayon.

At the end of the exercise I asked the class to raise the crayons that corresponded to my words--Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, and so on. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT of the participants successfully completed the exercise. The teacher-monitor who was observing the workshop was shocked speechless.

Try this exercise with crayons and with yarn. It heightens your powers of observation.

The heart will thirst for the water of love and the wine of romance.

Never write or paint to compete, but to satisfy a personal need.

The voice of your heart must prevail, whether in your joy or in your sadness.

It is highly inadvisable to think in one language and write in another. The result will sound like a poor translation.

Always keep a set of architectural blocks--or toy building blocks--on your writing desk. Rearrange their configuration from time to time. They will help you think three-dimensionally rather than linearly.

This always helps me envision staging possibilities whenever I am writing plays.

Developing Unique Perspectives

Imagine yourself waking up early one morning and discovering that you are the only man/woman in the world. Write about a day in your life with this given and describe everything through this new frame of reference.

After a few days reread what you have written. What were the major changes in your perception?

Note that if there were no changes, you need to further explore your powers of observation in the service of your imagination.

When the absence of the sun causes sadness, call forth the sun within your heart.

During respites from writing, collect photos of interiors and exteriors that interest you. Don't just look at the photos--visualize yourself in them, exploring them as far as you can go beyond the confines of the camera lens.

Every writer should be capable of penetrating multiple worlds.

It is easy to tell, from looking at his works, whether a painter is near-sighted or far-sighted.

You should be able to do the same to writers from reading their works.

Write about summer in the rainy season; write about the rain in summer. You will find that your work will be more vivid than your having written about summer in summer and the rain in the rainy season.

This is because creative writing relies on memory recall and emotional recall.

It also underscores the difference between the creative writer and the journalist, who must frequently write in the here and now.

Go easy on adjectives--they are mere embellishments. An overdose of them pushes your writing into immaturity.

Explore your nouns and your verbs. Discover how they can be powerful without help from other words.

Careful proofreading is always an assurance of not being unnecessarily misunderstood.

Go with the master who teaches you not to hide behind your writing but to emerge from it, who teaches you not from books but from life, who makes you fear not others but yourself.

Writing is like a martial art. You must first be trained to control your body and your feelings, and only then can your true spirit become free.

Do not write dialogue and then expect your character to arise from it.

First work on your character. Know him or her well. Know how he or she is feeling. Authentically feel what he or she is feeling.

As soon as you authentically feel what your character is feeling, dialogue will be spouted forth naturally, copiously, and uncontrollably from that character's mouth, including his/her particular frames of reference, associations, vocabulary, idioms and idiosyncracies of speech, verbal nuances, expressions, and an amazing power of language that is totally unlike your own.

The sun tells no stories, unlike the garrulous moon.

Clara's Article in _The Straits Times_

Contrary to what others might believe, the heart is not moody. It is as constant as the sun.

Both the mind and the heart labor, but they earn different wages and expect different rewards.

The heart and the mind sing different repertoires. That is why you cannot live to a single melody.

The heart always knows what the mind does not.