Between good and great
May 23, 2005 | 12:00am
It’s hard enough to achieve competence in language – especially a language that isn’t natively ours, to begin with – but in creative writing, the greater gulf to cross is that between being simply good and being truly great.
"Being good" is having a near-flawless command of the written language – its grammar, its idioms, its idiosyncrasies. Good writers have a fundamental understanding of what stories, poems, plays, and essays try to achieve – and can, most of the time, achieve them on demand. They know the elements of fiction (plot, character, point of view, etc.) and can handle versification as well as the next fellow. They’ll write pieces that will even win prizes and get published into perfectly respectable books. Some will teach, and produce equally good or even better students; many will be happy to publish the one book they’ve been nurturing in their stout hearts since childhood, before turning to actuarial science or gourmet cooking or teaching postcolonial theory, or giving up the ghost.
The only problem is, taken as a whole, the good writer’s work will barely leave a ripple on the surface of its reader’s memory. A clever twist in the plot, an unusual turn of phrase, a particularly tart witticism, a jazzy title – all of these will make their mark, and if you’re lucky the retentive reader might associate them with you. But is this all you want? "Oh, you’re the one who wrote that story about the three-headed monster, and the three heads have an argument about – what was that again?"
Some other stories or poems can be so technically perfect – especially after they’ve been pruned and polished in three different workshops – that there’s not a thing you can say against them. The language is impeccable, the tone just right, the ambiguity expertly achieved. Everything works – but when you add it all up, everything is very little, because nothing new is said, no risks are taken, and the reader can’t remember a thing – not even an image or a phrase – from the work just three days later.
There’s an American poet named Donald Hall who has made it his life’s crusade to inveigh against mediocrity in contemporary poetry – the proliferation of what he calls the "McPoem," referring to today’s billion-burger culture (never mind that some American critics themselves think of Donald Hall as a bad poet). Hall’s challenge to writers was: "You have just one chance to be Homer. Take it."
Purely by chance, while pondering this piece, I was sitting as a panelist in a dissertation defense on the work of the British novelist John Fowles (The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), and the dissertation quoted Fowles’ explanation of why a writer writes: "It is necessary to make my name known; I must have power – physical, social, intellectual, artistic, political… but power. I must leave monuments, I must be remembered. I must be admired, envied, hated, feared, desired. In short, I must endure."
Now, you may not want to be Fowles, much less Homer (Homer Simpson may be more your style) – and what’s wrong with that? Nothing, I think; everyone’s perfectly free to be modest and obscure, or to write about distinctly un-Homeric topics (a difficult thing for me to exemplify, now that I’m thinking about it; he wrote about them all – love, death, politics, sex, honor, vanity, religion, individualism, myth, even pets).
In our terms, you may not want to be Jose Rizal or Nick Joaquin. Fine. But on the other hand, I honestly can’t think of anyone who grows up thinking, "Oh, I want to be a mousy, mediocre, forgettable writer."
The point of Hall’s challenge is to break out of the mold and to do something fabulously memorable – in other words, to be great, to be enlarged by your own imagination and creative energy. I don’t think greatness (or, as Fowles puts it, endurance) is even something to consciously strive for; rather, it should be the consequence of the quality and consistency of one’s imaginative acts, the reward of a lifetime’s marvels and surprises – many hits, some misses – the specific reward being one’s continuing relevance to the breathing world, one’s continuing ability to delight and to instruct well past, if not during, one’s own time.
Good writers can and will say all the right things, for all the right reasons. Blessed are the poor; save the planet; crime does not pay; love conquers all; life’s a bitch, and then you die. Fine sentiments, all – and tedious clichés that, if they can’t be reversed, at least need to be refreshed. "Make it new!" was Ezra Pound’s admonition to the modernist age, and it remains a worthy challenge to the writer who, beyond mastering words, aspires to a mastery of human experience, by looking beneath the layers of our assumptions and pretenses, and by taking risks with character and material (and no, making you character say a cuss word every other minute is not risk-taking, unless you’re 15 years old). When I read a story, I’d like to be taken to untraveled territory, as John Updike does when he has Sammy say "I quit!" in "A&P" or as Kate Chopin does when she gives the young wife a heart attack in "The Story of an Hour."
We’re not talking about shock value here, but precisely about the fact that while these turns or endings may seem unbidden and even illogical, closer reading will show that they are, indeed, necessary and inevitable, entirely in keeping with the character – who has become fresh and interesting by going against his or her own character. There should be more than shock value to the unexpected: in a story by Raymond Carver whose title I forget, a long-married couple on the verge of a divorce encounter magic and mystery when four white horses suddenly appear at the window of their cottage; it doesn’t save the marriage, but it revivifies the pain and deepens the sadness.
But how many writers do that, or can do that? As I often tell my graduate writing class, we’re very good at rendering scenes, at depicting situations with microscopic fidelity, down to the last curl of hair and the last phlegmatic cough. But just when the scene is about to ignite dramatically, or just when you expect something new and marvelous to happen, the writer decides to get lazy and to play it safe, and tacks on one of those bitin endings that the writer thinks is artful and clever, but is actually a cop-out, a surrender of a story’s possibilities to its easiest and most obvious options.
Many good stories stop short of greatness because their writers didn’t think out of the box when faced with typical situations. For example, instructed to write a story dealing with poverty in Philippine society (something I expect my students to do without being told, if it interests them), most student writers will fall back on the familiar irony of, say, a yuppie couple arguing over which restaurant to go to in their late-model BMW, only to encounter a young sampaguita vendor at the stoplight, the dewy freshness of her flowers contrasting with the premature aging of her face. I’d give the writer one point (say, out of a possible five) for the albeit obvious irony, and maybe another point if the scene is rendered capably – but that’s as far as it gets, not until and unless the writer shapes this basic lump of material, like a glassblower, into a fluted vase.
This is why (aside from the 10-page limit imposed by most magazines and journals) few people write 25-page stories anymore; writers don’t know where to take their plots or how to develop their characters beyond the usual exchange of barbed witticisms over cappuccinos at Starbucks.
And now, to my own cop-out: I’ll continue with this mini-treatise on what I consider memorable writing next week, or when I next get the chance to (see the end of this column).
Meanwhile, instead of giving you all the answers, let me leave you with a problem, and I promise to read and discuss the most interesting responses.
Here’s the set-up:
A 35-year-old woman (let’s call her Laura) – unmarried, perhaps a teacher or a former nun or both – has just learned to drive a car, and is carefully going up the flyover on Katipunan Avenue. On the radio, she listens to a newscast and catches a snippet about a 17-year-old girl who was killed with two other friends the previous night in a horrible car crash on EDSA after a drinking binge.
Where’s the story, and if you just had another page to add, what would Laura do?
We learned that Annie and husband Ramon had four sons, all of whom were artists, especially painter Mark, a consistent prizewinner and now an instructor at his alma mater, the University of Sto. Tomas. Cat people that we are, we were especially taken by the abundance of feline pictures, figures, and masks in the shop – many of which, of course, found their way to our bags. The wares are made by the members of the family themselves, including Annie. It was Ramon’s late father, Ramon Sr., a municipal official and a poet, who coined the term "Pahiyas" in the 1970s to describe Lucban’s unique way of marking the feast day of San Isidro Labrador. The name stuck, as have the droves of tourists that descend on Lucban every 15th of May to revel in the colorful sea of kiping, gorge on pancit habhab and longganisang Lucban, and buy a straw hat or two. The only downside to the festival’s popularity has been its virtual hijacking by a cell phone company, the same situation (and the same company) you find in Boracay, where all the sails of the paraws have become just so much advertising space.
But seriously (or still maybe not), I’m supposed to be receiving a literary prize from a mountain town called Cervara di Roma, population less than 500. Sounds like a worthy mystery for this island boy from Romblon to solve. I’ll tell you about it when I get back on the 31st , and as soon as I figure out what the citation in Italian actually means. Ciao!
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