No write, no eat

I had a great time last week speaking before my youngest audience ever – a group of exceptionally bright children attending a special school, the Little Farm House Holistic Education and Development Center in Beverly Hills, Taytay. Part classroom, part garden, part zoo, and part laboratory, the HEDCen, as it’s called, caters to a small community (or a large family, if you will) of 300 students and teachers for whom personalized instruction is the norm. The school has grown along with the students, so there’s a junior high school class, but no seniors yet – but there are kids galore, happy hordes of them eager to show off the school’s pet python, ferret, and iguanas.

I knew one of them from babyhood – my friend Rayvi Sunico’s eight-year-old son Juani, whom I hadn’t seen for, uhm, half his life; Juani knew me, in turn, as "Butch Da Lizard," and embraced me in happy recognition as soon as I introduced myself by that noble name. Juani became my tour guide, dragging me from one exhibit to the next, and proudly announcing that their subjects (in Grade Two) included chemistry and ecology. A classmate of his named Kathy asked me what I wrote, and I must’ve mumbled something sadly impertinent because her next question was, "Do you write about cats? Can you write me a story about cats?" Yes, I will, Kathy, I certainly will, one of these days, and its hero will be a marmalade tomcat named Chippy, as grumpy and as sleepy as his "Mr. Boss."

They gathered up the whole school to listen to me talk about my life as a writer – mine was one of an ongoing series of talks on possible careers – and the teachers aside (most of whom seemed very young themselves), my audience ranged in age from about seven to 16. So I told them the usual stories I’ve already told at least twice over in this column – how I sewed sheets of bond paper together to make my own "books", how I start stories, what a typical day for me might be like. A stream of questions followed. One question I didn’t expect in its forthrightness was "Do you make a lot of money as a writer?"

Ah, the money question. I know I’ve taken it up here before, but let me give an extended answer for the benefit of some other readers (far older than 10 years old) who’ve been writing in to ask me about writing as a profession.

First, the short answer: "No – but if I don’t write, we don’t eat." I make enough to feed, house, and clothe myself and my family, for which I’m deeply thankful. Not too many people in this country can live off their writing, and I’m glad I’m able to – I’d better, because I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.

But "writing" here doesn’t mean writing novels or stories or even essays – what I’d really love to do if I had the time – but rather commercial jobs such as brochures, scripts, speeches, biographies, and coffee-table book projects, including editing and editorial supervision. (Forget what I make from teaching, even as a full professor; it might be enough for a 25-year-old bachelor to live on.)

I treat every project as seriously and as carefully as I do my own stories; like I often say, I look at every job I take on – no matter how seemingly slight or even silly – as my first, last, and only job. That’s how I maintain my professionalism and sense of humor – both of which are often tested by clients who insist on knowing better about what they hired you to do, or who see the text you’re writing for them as an arena for internal politics. Despite all these I do my best to please the client, and if he hires me to write about a bar of soap and if I’m desperate enough to say yes, then he’ll get the best piece on a bar of soap his money can buy.

In other words, I sort the writing I do for myself from the writing I do for others, but try to achieve some excellence in both. Admittedly the many decades I’ve spent writing for a living have rubbed off much of the romantic sheen of writing – I think it’s mostly technique, although I’m always open to serendipitous turns of plot and character – but they’ve also imbued me with a sense of writing as a professional, lifetime discipline, rather than an amateur’s passionate but passing fling with words.

I know that it’s hard to describe writing as a profession when there’s not much money to be made from it, unless you write until your eyeballs go white, like I do. You certainly can’t live off fiction; a short story in the local magazine might net you P1,500 tops. A novel might earn you some P30,000 to P50,000 in royalties over a couple of years – if you sell all 1,000 copies. A Palanca Award could enrich you by P12,000 – but how many can you win, and how often?

But then writing’s the only thing we know, and doing it well is half the compensation, leaving us with a sense of a world just slightly clearer, fresher, and perhaps more tolerable for the words we brought into it. I’ll end for now with a passage from a fascinating book I’ll be quoting from again some other time, The Cost of Letters (A Survey of Literary Living Standards), edited by Andrew Holgate and Hoinor Wilson-Fletcher (Middlesex: Waterstone’s, 1998). This is from Julian Barnes, author of Flaubert’s Parrot and other modern masterpieces:

"My advice to young writers would be: don’t do it unless you really want to; don’t do it expecting that it will support you; don’t do it imagining that once your talent has been revealed, the world will conclude that it owes you a living; don’t do it to mend some hole in your life or purge yourself of some pain; don’t do it unless you believe, utterly, that making art is the most important thing there is; don’t do it assuming that the result will ever satisfy you. And finally: don’t take advice from older writers – they’re only talking to themselves. It’s different for you. You’re starting afresh. The world awaits. Go for it."

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From my faithful correspondent Freddie Santos came this musing on the enduring power and allure of the pen in this digital age: "The pen is indeed mightier than the keyboard, at least for the ‘immigrants’ like ourselves (people born before 1976, ‘natives’ are those born after). There’s no feeling quite the same as the exuberance brought about by words coming together in one’s system and only the pen has the humility to disappear from the process and allow the words – and the various, unpredictable speeds at which they come – to rule the moment.

"A keyboard, manual, electric or electronic, always seems to call some attention to itself especially for a non-touch typist like myself. Not surprisingly, it is its inability to identify with the writer’s feelings that make it so, what’s the word, un-right. A pen, on the other hand, will allow you to wallow in your emotional roller coaster as you darn well please, blotting away when your anger rises, skipping in the midst of static confusion, doodling in circles when logic takes a pause, gliding along when your mind does.

"Sigh. I am eight laptops old and still, so bloodily, happily analog."

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Erratum: On pain of being disinherited out of my share of a small strip of white-sand beach in Romblon, I’d like to make a correction demanded by my mom after last week’s piece on UP. She appeared in the 1953, not 1956, edition of the Philippinensian. She belonged to the batch of ’53 (with Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio and Juan Ponce Enrile, among others), but graduated only in 1956 because of, uhm, me. Thanks, Mom!

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Folks, sorry to have to keep saying this like a broken record, but I really, really can’t comment on your work; I have no time to read it well enough to give it justice. Please, no unsolicited stories or poems in the mail, unless they’re just for me to read in some blessedly deadline-free future.

I respond to e-mail interviews, but don’t ask me questions like "What have you written?" or "What did you mean in this story?" I spent valuable time last week answering more than a dozen questions sent in by several batches of desperate college students; I didn’t even get an e-mailed "thank you" from two of those groups. Alas, whatever happened to good manners?

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