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Plumbing, electrical, mechanical, whatever. I've been fixing things since I could hold a wrench. Albert Kenel taught me: don't stare at it, fix it. Bring the broken thing. I'll tell you what's wrong in thirty seconds and fix it in thirty minutes.

Visit my collection of retablos, ex-votos, and Judas figures. Then paint your own retablo -- a small tin painting of a miracle or survival. In Mexico, we thank the saints by painting what they saved us from. What has life saved you from? Paint that.

I'll teach you to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite. Hallelujah took eighty drafts. That's not failure. That's craft. We start with a feeling, turn it into an image, then carve it into a verse. Bring patience. This is a slow art.

Everyone has a story that needs telling. I went mute for five years and then I couldn't stop talking. We'll work on memory, honesty, and the courage to write the parts that scare you. Those are the parts that matter. Bring nothing but yourself and something to write with.

Write the impossible as if it were the most natural thing in the world. That's the technique. No winking at the reader. No 'this is strange.' Just: 'It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.' Stated as fact. Because in Macondo, it is. Bring a family story that nobody believes. We'll turn it into literature.

We will take your sentences apart and rebuild them. A sentence is not just communication. It is music, rhythm, architecture. Every word earns its place or it leaves. I edited for twenty years before I published. Bring your best paragraph. We'll find out if it's really your best.

I'll teach you to create a character you can perform as -- costume, voice, attitude, mythology. Then we'll retire that character and build another one. The point isn't the mask. The point is the freedom the mask gives you to be truthful.

The strum that changed the world hits on the upbeat. That's it. That's the secret. But making it groove -- that's what we'll work on. I'll teach you the skank, the one-drop rhythm, and how to make three chords feel like freedom.

The church is where it all starts. I'll teach you to sing from the diaphragm, to bend notes, to build from a whisper to a scream that fills the room. Gospel technique is the foundation of all American popular music. If you can sing gospel, you can sing anything.

I write the words first. Always. The melody finds its way to the words. We'll work on imagery, metaphor, and the art of saying something so specific it becomes universal. Bring a notebook. Leave your guitar at home for the first session.

Learn to improvise with your voice using syllables, rhythms, and melodic invention. No words. Just sound. I'll teach you the vocabulary of scat -- the bops, the doos, the ba-da-ba-das -- and then we throw the vocabulary away and you find your own.

I trained for classical concert piano and ended up playing jazz in bars. That's not a step down -- that's a synthesis. I'll teach you to bring classical discipline to any genre. Bach and the blues are closer than you think.