The hardest story to write

What kind of story is the hardest to write?" a student asked me the other day. I told him I’d have to think about it; I did, and here’s my answer – or, rather, two answers I can give to his question.

The first is: the hardest story to write is the story that no one else has written. Is there such a story? We’ll know it when we see it. One of the ways by which we recognize a so-called "classic" like James Joyce’s "Araby" is how it seems to have been the first of its kind, and how so many other stories seem to have copied it afterward.

It’s very difficult – if not even unfair – to expect new young writers to live up to Ezra Pound’s admonition to "Make it new!" or even Franz Arcellana’s exhortation to "Write the story that only you can write." But that’s the burden we all assume the second we open a new document on the word processor or feed a fresh sheet into the typewriter. Like I tell my students, if it’s been written this way before, why even bother doing it again?

That brings me to my second answer, which is: the hardest story to write is that which has already been written by everyone else – but which you will write again, with a difference. There may be only so many messages a story can carry, and so many patterns it can employ. But there must always be another way of looking at and representing something – be it an abstract concept like "justice," or an object as concrete as a coffee cup on a table (the adventurous writer should, in fact, explore the possible connections between justice and a coffee cup).

The real challenge of writing, for me, isn’t in so much in "creating" or (to use a term beloved of sci-fi buffs) "worlding" new realms and spheres of human experience. Anyone who can count up to a hundred can design a solar system 86 light-years away, with a terraform planet peopled by androids with seven  senses (including, natch, telepathy) and organized into complex social hierarchies with very precise rules (this is where many such projects break down, somewhere in Chapter 4: does a second-generation djinzhik outrank a three-toed mogor?).

It’s always more difficult to deal with the here and now, to do something wondrous with the banality and predictability of everyday life. This not only takes raw imagination, which even 9-year-olds have aplenty; it takes maturity, which even 59-year-olds might not possess. In this sense, the toughest story to write is a fresh, credible, and riveting love story set in, say, a McDonalds or Jollibee in Quiapo or Cubao; harder still if the story has a happy ending we can all believe in.

I know this betrays my bias for fiction in the old-fashioned realist mode, shorn of stylistic sorcery and linguistic legerdemain. It’s not that I abhor or mean to devalue experimentation and playfulness, without which all writing will simply ossify and die. Many wonderful things have been written in the magic-realist and metafictional modes (more on these in another column), and let’s not forget that "realism" is, itself, a deceptive misnomer, just another play of smoke and mirrors aimed at making you believe that something "really happened."

Maybe I just like to make things more difficult for my students, by reining them in before cutting them loose. They winced this week when I suggested that, if I was in my right mind, I should’ve enforced the following limitations:

• Don’t write a story with any of the following elements in it: a watch or an alarm clock, a full moon, a broken heart, and blood or death.

• Don’t write a story with a central character who walks, talks, and squawks just like you.

• Don’t write a story that quotes from or drops the name of a famous writer, a rock band, a European or Chinese philosopher, or a cartoon character.

For 19- or 20-year-olds, that’s probably as difficult as it gets. But wasn’t creative writing supposed to be fun? Of course – and this is my idea of it; "fun" never did mean "easy." The most difficult stories to write are, ultimately, the only ones worth writing.

* * *

It’s too bad if the reports are true that a well-known writer has resigned from his job as editor-in-chief of a popular magazine because of that publication’s plans to shut down its literary section. Its literary editor is already on "protest leave" for the same inattention to the only thing that, quite frankly, has saved the publication from being just like any other weekly.

What a sorry comedown this situation is from the heydays of that magazine as a purveyor of new Philippine literature, alongside only a few others assuming that noble mission. It’s bad enough that we hardly have any alternatives on TV and in the movies to the usual fare of slapstick and melodrama. Publishers talk all the time in their conventions and seminars about contributing to "nation-building" – only to retreat when and where their intervention might truly count.

* * *

My hacked e-mail saga (see last week’s column, "Nastier than a virus") took another turn when, upon reading that piece, one of my writer-friends sent me a note asking if I had sent her a message a few weeks ago with a picture attached. I was positive I hadn’t, and I cringed at the thought of what that picture might have been and what my friend would’ve thought of me sending it to her.

This reminds me that only a couple of months ago, another reader wrote me to say that he had located and visited my homepage, only to find that at least one of the links in it – which was supposed to bring up an on-line bookstore – led to a porn site.

If you happen to have received a threat, an offensive picture, or something unpleasant from me – after determining, of course, that I have no justifiable reason to send you the e-mail equivalent of a stink bomb – please let me know so I can at least figure out just how much damage has been done by my on-line nemesis, and make the proper amends. I could very well be making enemies and losing friends all over the place for all I know – without the pleasure of picking my own fights, choosing my own targets, and confecting my own curses.

* * *

It must be term-paper time when I find four messages in my inbox asking me questions about Killing Time in a Warm Place, a novel I wrote nine years ago.

It isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it certainly won’t be the last. The questions typically ask me to explain the title of my work, define the relationships of the characters to one another, enumerate the lessons embedded in the narrative, and – by the by – account for the past 47 years of my life.

My standard response to this is: "Dear XXX, Thank you for your message, and for your interest in my work. Not to be rude or unhelpful, but may I suggest, speaking as both a teacher and a writer, that you do your job as I had to do mine. Hard as it may be to believe, the writer doesn’t know any more about his or her work than the sharp and patient reader can discover. The first one’s me, and the second one should be, well, you. Yours sincerely, etc. etc."

* * *

From Pete Lacaba – poet, scriptwriter, editor, fellow Mac user, and karaoke addict – comes this interesting response to my column two weeks ago on Cole Porter and other fabulous lyricists of the past. I’d written that National Artist Nick Joaquin had penned his own version of "You’re the Top," but didn’t know the words. Pete helpfully supplied the lyrics below:

You’re the top!
You’re Mayon Volcano.
You’re the top!
You’re Virgie Moreyno.
You’re the rose
In a poem by Villa.
You’re the prose of Manuel Arguilla.
You’re the sob and sigh of Kabayao’s violin,
You’re lechon de leche,
You’re escabeche,
You’re Nick Joaquin.

"If I remember correctly," Pete adds, "the frontispiece of the collected poems of Rizal, translated by Nick Joaquin, reproduces the text of the Nick Joaquin version of the Cole Porter song – handwritten on an Indios Bravos napkin. Unfortunately, I can’t find my copy of this book." Pete also provided a "parody version" [warning: adult material ahead] from The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992) which, he says, was "believed written by Cole Porter himself and the lyrics of which are never heard in the sung versions":

You’re the top!
You’re the Miss Pinkham’s tonic.
You’re the top!
You’re a high colonic.
You’re the burning heat of a bridal suite in use,
You’re the breasts of Venus,
You’re King Kong’s penis,
You’re self-abuse.
You’re an arch
In the Rome collection.
You’re the starch
In a groom’s erection.
I’m a eunuch who
Has just been through an op,
But if, baby, I’m the bottom
You’re the top!

* * *

Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.