Studying to write
June 27, 2005 | 12:00am
I know this isn’t the op-ed page, but since questions of censorship affect all writers and artists, may I register my protest against what I sense to be the creeping curtailment of free speech in this country.
The most egregious and indeed almost comically absurd example of this was the reported raid on a printing press that had been churning out posters representing President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as Valentina, our homegrown Medusa, following the release of the so-called "Hello, Garci" tape. The printers were charged by the National Bureau of Investigation with "inciting to sedition." Huh? Since when has lampooning the high and mighty been a crime? Not even Ferdinand Marcos hauled us off to jail specifically for spreading posters depicting him as a reincarnated Adolf Hitler.
On a more disturbing scale, this idiocy was echoed by reported moves by the National Telecommunications Commission and the Department of Justice threatening sanctions against media organizations or citizens spreading the tapes. (Of course, in typical Filipino fashion, this only spurred their distribution even more widely.) Where have we come to, and who needs martial law if, in a blind panic, the administration can issue these charges and decrees at will?
If the President wants reasoned debate to rule over malicious gossip and comic ridicule, she has only to do one thing, instead of muzzling the messengers – tell the plain and honest truth about those tapes. And since her person is in question, she should speak out herself, without resorting to spokesmen, spin doctors, and message handlers, the sooner the better. Otherwise, she leaves herself fair game to the Hogarths and Jonathan Swifts among us – not that her arresting parties would know nor care who these worthies were.
Every June, a horde of new creative writing students arrives on campus, eager to get started on writing that novel or that suite of poems that’s been running in their heads since they first stumbled on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
As a member of the faculty and creative writing coordinator, I welcome them with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I envy their earnest exuberance, lurking beneath the nervous smiles and the carefree snickers. However you look or whatever you say, there has to be a spot of fervent goodness in your heart if you plan on becoming a writer, a musician, or an artist. Many of these kids would have had a hard time convincing their parents to let them take creative writing, when they could have – maybe should have – been lawyers, engineers, physicists, and accountants. Quite a number would have genuine talent – or at least, a fascination and respect for language and its wonderfully strange behavior in the hands of the masters (and of perfectly unschooled, quirkily brilliant novices).
On the other hand, it saddens me to greet them with the foreknowledge that even in the best of worlds, very few of them will actually become productive, practicing, reader-worthy writers 10 years hence. Experience tells me that every batch of majors would be lucky to count one or two truly outstanding writers among them. It isn’t just talent that will set these few apart – just as importantly, they will have the drive, the discipline, and the perseverance to keep writing and writing well long after school. Even with all the writing programs, workshops, and contests now in place to discover and encourage the young Filipino writer, it will be good enough if every year contributed one such bright and enduring star to the literary firmament. It should be possible, for example, to encapsulate the history of Philippine literature in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the works and careers of about two dozen writers in all genres and Philippine languages, plus English.
Creative writing, in other words, has one of the highest attrition rates as an academic program, and solely from the point of view of returns on investment, such programs probably deserve to be shut down, if by "returns" we mean gut-wrenching novels and mind-blowing poems. Skeptics will recall a time, not too long ago, when creative writing wasn’t even something you got a college degree for, but simply something you mysteriously imbibed through voracious reading and by practicing the linguistic equivalent of compulsive self-abuse. The time-honored path to writing was through a regular course in English (in the days before Filipino), journalism, education, and even psychology or medicine.
Before the mid-20th century, nobody went to writing school because there wasn’t any, at least not here in this country; name any accomplished Filipino writer born before the Second World War and you can bet that he or she never picked up a degree in creative writing, with the notable exception of such as the Tiempos – Edilberto and Edith – who went through the graduate workshops in the United States and brought them back to the Philippines, along with a potent dose of New Criticism.
Today, the situation is almost entirely the opposite, with a diploma and preferably a graduate degree in creative writing considered de rigueur for serious young writers intent on making a career – or at least the foundation of one – of their talents. MA and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs in creative writing have mushroomed in universities here and abroad; many offer PhDs. In the United States, graduate writing programs have begun to rival or at least mimic athletic programs in their visibility and alumni appeal, with universities vying for leading writers – Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinners preferred – to grace their faculty rosters and in turn attract the best students. It seems a fair exchange for both school and student – the school burnishes its humanist reputation (while silently betting on producing the next David Leavitt, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Jhumpa Lahiri), and the student gets to do what he or she really wants to do, with academic credit to boot.
For all these, basic questions persist in many people’s minds. Can writing be really taught and learned? It’s a question that again betrays a perception of writing as a natural skill or gift – a notion I just can’t buy. Have you ever wondered why there are very few real writing prodigies, if any, not in the same way that you have eight-year-old Mozarts writing complete symphonies and Ramanujans discovering math theorems at 12? It’s because creative writing requires experience and socialization – you need to have lived, grown up, and interacted with others to be able to say something insightful and worthwhile about the human condition. Math, music, and chess flourish on the plane of abstract reasoning – the divination of patterns and logical possibilities. Literature has its own structures and its own requirements of necessity and probability (at least in realist fiction), but you need concrete human details to fill in those little boxes – yellow shawls, old men and barracudas, Medusas, warm hands, lovers of lavender, happy birthdays, and Parker pen fanciers.
Many of the givens of writing will come with the writer himself or herself – the material, the treatment, the outlook on life, the deployment of language on the page. But many skills can also be taught – techniques of description and narration, choice of point of view, the handling of time, the use of dialogue, etc. We don’t wonder or complain when art students submit studies or when musicians practice for hours on their instruments; why should creative writing – the fine art of words – be any different?
And so I look forward to a semester of productive engagement with my Creative Writing 110 (Fiction Writing) class. If I can find and encourage that one Bienvenido Santos or Kerima Polotan among them, then lecturing to the other 14 will have been worth it; better yet if I can help each of those 14 tell that one ragged but soulful story brewing and brooding in their young hearts.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
The most egregious and indeed almost comically absurd example of this was the reported raid on a printing press that had been churning out posters representing President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as Valentina, our homegrown Medusa, following the release of the so-called "Hello, Garci" tape. The printers were charged by the National Bureau of Investigation with "inciting to sedition." Huh? Since when has lampooning the high and mighty been a crime? Not even Ferdinand Marcos hauled us off to jail specifically for spreading posters depicting him as a reincarnated Adolf Hitler.
On a more disturbing scale, this idiocy was echoed by reported moves by the National Telecommunications Commission and the Department of Justice threatening sanctions against media organizations or citizens spreading the tapes. (Of course, in typical Filipino fashion, this only spurred their distribution even more widely.) Where have we come to, and who needs martial law if, in a blind panic, the administration can issue these charges and decrees at will?
If the President wants reasoned debate to rule over malicious gossip and comic ridicule, she has only to do one thing, instead of muzzling the messengers – tell the plain and honest truth about those tapes. And since her person is in question, she should speak out herself, without resorting to spokesmen, spin doctors, and message handlers, the sooner the better. Otherwise, she leaves herself fair game to the Hogarths and Jonathan Swifts among us – not that her arresting parties would know nor care who these worthies were.
As a member of the faculty and creative writing coordinator, I welcome them with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I envy their earnest exuberance, lurking beneath the nervous smiles and the carefree snickers. However you look or whatever you say, there has to be a spot of fervent goodness in your heart if you plan on becoming a writer, a musician, or an artist. Many of these kids would have had a hard time convincing their parents to let them take creative writing, when they could have – maybe should have – been lawyers, engineers, physicists, and accountants. Quite a number would have genuine talent – or at least, a fascination and respect for language and its wonderfully strange behavior in the hands of the masters (and of perfectly unschooled, quirkily brilliant novices).
On the other hand, it saddens me to greet them with the foreknowledge that even in the best of worlds, very few of them will actually become productive, practicing, reader-worthy writers 10 years hence. Experience tells me that every batch of majors would be lucky to count one or two truly outstanding writers among them. It isn’t just talent that will set these few apart – just as importantly, they will have the drive, the discipline, and the perseverance to keep writing and writing well long after school. Even with all the writing programs, workshops, and contests now in place to discover and encourage the young Filipino writer, it will be good enough if every year contributed one such bright and enduring star to the literary firmament. It should be possible, for example, to encapsulate the history of Philippine literature in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the works and careers of about two dozen writers in all genres and Philippine languages, plus English.
Creative writing, in other words, has one of the highest attrition rates as an academic program, and solely from the point of view of returns on investment, such programs probably deserve to be shut down, if by "returns" we mean gut-wrenching novels and mind-blowing poems. Skeptics will recall a time, not too long ago, when creative writing wasn’t even something you got a college degree for, but simply something you mysteriously imbibed through voracious reading and by practicing the linguistic equivalent of compulsive self-abuse. The time-honored path to writing was through a regular course in English (in the days before Filipino), journalism, education, and even psychology or medicine.
Before the mid-20th century, nobody went to writing school because there wasn’t any, at least not here in this country; name any accomplished Filipino writer born before the Second World War and you can bet that he or she never picked up a degree in creative writing, with the notable exception of such as the Tiempos – Edilberto and Edith – who went through the graduate workshops in the United States and brought them back to the Philippines, along with a potent dose of New Criticism.
Today, the situation is almost entirely the opposite, with a diploma and preferably a graduate degree in creative writing considered de rigueur for serious young writers intent on making a career – or at least the foundation of one – of their talents. MA and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs in creative writing have mushroomed in universities here and abroad; many offer PhDs. In the United States, graduate writing programs have begun to rival or at least mimic athletic programs in their visibility and alumni appeal, with universities vying for leading writers – Nobel and Pulitzer prizewinners preferred – to grace their faculty rosters and in turn attract the best students. It seems a fair exchange for both school and student – the school burnishes its humanist reputation (while silently betting on producing the next David Leavitt, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Jhumpa Lahiri), and the student gets to do what he or she really wants to do, with academic credit to boot.
For all these, basic questions persist in many people’s minds. Can writing be really taught and learned? It’s a question that again betrays a perception of writing as a natural skill or gift – a notion I just can’t buy. Have you ever wondered why there are very few real writing prodigies, if any, not in the same way that you have eight-year-old Mozarts writing complete symphonies and Ramanujans discovering math theorems at 12? It’s because creative writing requires experience and socialization – you need to have lived, grown up, and interacted with others to be able to say something insightful and worthwhile about the human condition. Math, music, and chess flourish on the plane of abstract reasoning – the divination of patterns and logical possibilities. Literature has its own structures and its own requirements of necessity and probability (at least in realist fiction), but you need concrete human details to fill in those little boxes – yellow shawls, old men and barracudas, Medusas, warm hands, lovers of lavender, happy birthdays, and Parker pen fanciers.
Many of the givens of writing will come with the writer himself or herself – the material, the treatment, the outlook on life, the deployment of language on the page. But many skills can also be taught – techniques of description and narration, choice of point of view, the handling of time, the use of dialogue, etc. We don’t wonder or complain when art students submit studies or when musicians practice for hours on their instruments; why should creative writing – the fine art of words – be any different?
And so I look forward to a semester of productive engagement with my Creative Writing 110 (Fiction Writing) class. If I can find and encourage that one Bienvenido Santos or Kerima Polotan among them, then lecturing to the other 14 will have been worth it; better yet if I can help each of those 14 tell that one ragged but soulful story brewing and brooding in their young hearts.
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