Somewhere we’ve never traveled
January 30, 2006 | 12:00am
Before we return to regular programming (i.e., writing workshop) from our two-week jaunt through the world of Macworld, let me make a few corrections to some details in previous columns.
In my piece "Romancing the Gifted" (Jan. 9), I credited Joel Navarro for composing the song Tuwing Umuulan at Kapiling Ka; it was another contemporary, Ryan Cayabyab, who wrote that song. Instead, Joel composed the equally catchy Suwerte-Suwerte Lang (Pag Umuulan). At least I got the weather right.
In that same column I identified myself as a member of Batch 1970 of the Philippine Science High School, causing some consternation among the proper members of Batches ’70 and ’71. This stems from an interesting footnote to PSHS history, in that I belonged to a unique section that finished high school in 4-1/4 years; if that makes us sound stupid, let me explain that, in its formative years, the PSHS had a five-year curriculum, beginning with a strangely-named "zero year."
Later, it occurred to me – as a third-year sophomore and editor of the school paper – that if we were so smart, we should get out of high school sooner and not later than everybody else, so I fueled a campaign to bring our indenture down to a regular four years, if not shorter. Wonder of wonders, the idea was approved, and my batch found itself caught in the cusp. We were given a choice of graduating with the batch next to us (and be the last five-year batch) or to graduate mid-year in October. A handful of us couldn’t wait; we were put in one section, and graduated in October 1970. I entered UP that same month, just in time to catch the rising swell of the First Quarter Storm.
Lastly, it was Ben – not Bob – Razon who wrote me about his new Mac. This photographer is also a blogger (check him out at http://oarhouse.blogspot.com) who’s a regular at a bar and restaurant called the Oarhouse on 1803 A. Mabini St. in Malate. Ben wrote me again to announce that the Oarhouse will be holding a special Super Bowl XL Breakfast Buffet on Feb. 6, Monday morning Manila time, from 6 to 11 a.m., featuring the live broadcast of the National Football League Championship Game at Ford Stadium in Detroit between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks.
If you’re interested in joining this early morning Super Bowl party, Ben requests that you pay for the P150 breakfast ticket in advance to Wilson, the bartender at the Oarhouse, entitling you to a hearty morning serving of eggs, sausages, corned beef, bread or rice, and bottomless brewed coffee and juices, continental-style. Beer at the happy hour rate and the other regular bar drinks will be available.
I’ve never been there, but cornerbacks and corned beef sound like my kind of breakfast.
Okay, let’s move on to something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time, having to do with the mistakes or missteps that new or young short story writers tend to make, based on the hundreds of student manuscripts I’ve gone through in class and in workshops these past few years. (Let me put in the usual caveat that a "mistake" to me might be a merit to others, and anyone taking this advice seriously should remember that marvelous exceptions exist to every so-called rule in writing. Also, to be sure, these problems are hardly exclusive to newbies.) I’m not even going to go here into problems with language, another bane altogether, but will confine myself to matters of concept or conception, of the way we look at and shape the story.
The first is what I’ll call the "cop-out," where the writer chooses the most obvious and most predictable way to resolve a conflict. Sometimes this takes the form of the protagonist committing suicide, or killing his or her adversary.
Death may be a heavy burden to bear in real life, but in fiction, it can be an easy way out, indeed a lightweight solution to what could be a truly cosmic dramatic problem. Don’t forget that sometimes, if not often, it’s more difficult to be alive and to have to deal with the consequences of one’s actions than to be dead and beyond the pale of justice. An exception would be a story like Willa Cather’s "Paul’s Case," where Paul’s suicide comes as the only logical and literally breathtaking option left for someone in his situation.
The cop-out can also come in the form of the prematurely truncated ending, whereby the author – perhaps after developing a situation so complicated that he or she can no longer unravel it or see a clear way through – throws up his or her hands and says, "Well, let’s just leave it to the reader to figure out what happened!"
The bitin or ambiguous ending can be an artful device that can engage the reader’s imagination, and gift the reader with the supreme satisfaction of figuring things out; the aesthetic pleasure of discovery (and especially of self-discovery, of finding oneself in the story) should be one of the rewards or pay-offs of every story.
A great story, I’ve always thought, will generate its own future. In other words, a reasonably sharp reader ought to be able to see beyond the immediate horizon of the plot into the unwritten aftermath of events. Stories like Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants" and Manuel Arguilla’s "Midsummer" are much more interesting and more powerful for not telling us outright what will happen next – and by these stories’ endings, "what will happen next" is actually less important than how things got there in the first place.
But that’s different from a hopelessly muddled story that simply staggers to an abrupt halt, because the author doesn’t know any better what to do with it. To avoid a cop-out, bring the reader to a point where his or her intelligence can take over, and let go – but not before you’ve found and engaged the story’s most difficult possibilities.
This brings me to my second point, my oft-mentioned mantra for the writer to raise the stakes, to take risks and push the narrative or dramatic envelope. This can mean getting out of familiar situations – indeed, defamiliarizing them, or making the old new again.
Nothing can be too strange in a world full of grotesque realities and bizarre juxtapositions. What will happen if you transpose a story set in Pasay – let’s assume the usual urchin-pickpocket setup – to, say, Paris, where the character is no longer an urchin but an OFW seduced by the glitter on display? Or do the reverse, and transform that Burger Machine stand in Baclaran into a place of mystery and wonder. You can start with something terribly trite – like two maids dusting the furniture in the opening scene – but use totally unexpected dialogue, or throw some monkey wrench into the plot (like a monkey in the window?) to take us somewhere they and we have never traveled.
Another weakness of new writers – I think especially the young – is their inability or unwillingness to deal both boldly and finely with strong emotions, for which shock or raw anger are often made to serve as substitutes. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the influence of American minimalism, which deliberately downplays emotion and prizes a certain flatness of surface and surface effects. It could also be a studied reaction to the melodrama swirling around us, in real life as on TV and the in the movies.
People cry; people scream; people throw fits; people laugh deliriously; people make love in all kinds of places; people maim and kill each other in all kinds of ways. If people don’t do any of these in your stories – if all they do is sip tepid coffee in Starbucks talking about relationships rather than actually having one or a more active one – then you’d better have a good reason. But more than their presence, it’s the quality of these experiences (and, as much, the quality of their descriptions) that matter in good realist fiction. (I’ve slipped in the R word there, "realist," simply to remind us that realism is, itself, a pose and an option.)
Sure, there are stories where seemingly nothing happens – again, easy examples are ""Hills Like White Elephants" and "Midsummer" – but that surface calm belies the roiling currents underneath, and their dramatic power (an extremely erotic power, in the case of "Midsummer") is produced precisely by the restraint employed by the author on the material.
(On a related note – and as the possible subject of another piece – let me observe the perplexing absence of sex and crime from traditional Philippine fiction in English. Given our birth and crime rates, you’d think there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on in these islands – but no, not if all you had to go by were our stories, at least until recently, with some young writers invoking the F word every other sentence, as if to make up for some historical imbalance.)
It’s too easy to conclude that people don’t write about some things because they don’t know about them, and certainly too patronizing to say that they’re too young. Absolutely not; I think the true test of writing is to write beyond your own age and your own experience, to inhabit and represent other people’s lives. Until you write them and about them, you’ll never know them.
Lastly for now, let me remark on the stubborn refusal – or maybe again, the inability – of some new writers to revise their work, even after its obvious flaws have been pointed out to them in a workshop. Everyone has a right to preserve and fight for his or her own vision and version of a story, and it’s always possible that you could be right and 20 other people – including the instructor – dead wrong.
But do that on your own time; there’ll be a lot of time for it, too, after the workshops and out of school, when you’ll have no one looking over your shoulder, guessing at your intentions and commenting on your delivery. (Hey, you might even miss it!) As far as I’m concerned, every work submitted to class or workshop – no matter how seemingly perfect (as a rare few turn out to be) – is a malleable draft.
Revision is a sign of maturity, of finally grasping and realizing the true worth of your creation. The work matures, you mature. It may not be something you can do – and it’s something you really shouldn’t do – the day after the workshop, trying to incorporate everyone’s comments to their satisfaction. Let the sting of the critiques and the euphoria of the praises pass, maybe over a week or a month – then sit down quietly and patiently to the task at hand, "killing your babies" if you have to, as Nick Joaquin so memorably suggested.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.
In my piece "Romancing the Gifted" (Jan. 9), I credited Joel Navarro for composing the song Tuwing Umuulan at Kapiling Ka; it was another contemporary, Ryan Cayabyab, who wrote that song. Instead, Joel composed the equally catchy Suwerte-Suwerte Lang (Pag Umuulan). At least I got the weather right.
In that same column I identified myself as a member of Batch 1970 of the Philippine Science High School, causing some consternation among the proper members of Batches ’70 and ’71. This stems from an interesting footnote to PSHS history, in that I belonged to a unique section that finished high school in 4-1/4 years; if that makes us sound stupid, let me explain that, in its formative years, the PSHS had a five-year curriculum, beginning with a strangely-named "zero year."
Later, it occurred to me – as a third-year sophomore and editor of the school paper – that if we were so smart, we should get out of high school sooner and not later than everybody else, so I fueled a campaign to bring our indenture down to a regular four years, if not shorter. Wonder of wonders, the idea was approved, and my batch found itself caught in the cusp. We were given a choice of graduating with the batch next to us (and be the last five-year batch) or to graduate mid-year in October. A handful of us couldn’t wait; we were put in one section, and graduated in October 1970. I entered UP that same month, just in time to catch the rising swell of the First Quarter Storm.
Lastly, it was Ben – not Bob – Razon who wrote me about his new Mac. This photographer is also a blogger (check him out at http://oarhouse.blogspot.com) who’s a regular at a bar and restaurant called the Oarhouse on 1803 A. Mabini St. in Malate. Ben wrote me again to announce that the Oarhouse will be holding a special Super Bowl XL Breakfast Buffet on Feb. 6, Monday morning Manila time, from 6 to 11 a.m., featuring the live broadcast of the National Football League Championship Game at Ford Stadium in Detroit between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks.
If you’re interested in joining this early morning Super Bowl party, Ben requests that you pay for the P150 breakfast ticket in advance to Wilson, the bartender at the Oarhouse, entitling you to a hearty morning serving of eggs, sausages, corned beef, bread or rice, and bottomless brewed coffee and juices, continental-style. Beer at the happy hour rate and the other regular bar drinks will be available.
I’ve never been there, but cornerbacks and corned beef sound like my kind of breakfast.
The first is what I’ll call the "cop-out," where the writer chooses the most obvious and most predictable way to resolve a conflict. Sometimes this takes the form of the protagonist committing suicide, or killing his or her adversary.
Death may be a heavy burden to bear in real life, but in fiction, it can be an easy way out, indeed a lightweight solution to what could be a truly cosmic dramatic problem. Don’t forget that sometimes, if not often, it’s more difficult to be alive and to have to deal with the consequences of one’s actions than to be dead and beyond the pale of justice. An exception would be a story like Willa Cather’s "Paul’s Case," where Paul’s suicide comes as the only logical and literally breathtaking option left for someone in his situation.
The cop-out can also come in the form of the prematurely truncated ending, whereby the author – perhaps after developing a situation so complicated that he or she can no longer unravel it or see a clear way through – throws up his or her hands and says, "Well, let’s just leave it to the reader to figure out what happened!"
The bitin or ambiguous ending can be an artful device that can engage the reader’s imagination, and gift the reader with the supreme satisfaction of figuring things out; the aesthetic pleasure of discovery (and especially of self-discovery, of finding oneself in the story) should be one of the rewards or pay-offs of every story.
A great story, I’ve always thought, will generate its own future. In other words, a reasonably sharp reader ought to be able to see beyond the immediate horizon of the plot into the unwritten aftermath of events. Stories like Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants" and Manuel Arguilla’s "Midsummer" are much more interesting and more powerful for not telling us outright what will happen next – and by these stories’ endings, "what will happen next" is actually less important than how things got there in the first place.
But that’s different from a hopelessly muddled story that simply staggers to an abrupt halt, because the author doesn’t know any better what to do with it. To avoid a cop-out, bring the reader to a point where his or her intelligence can take over, and let go – but not before you’ve found and engaged the story’s most difficult possibilities.
This brings me to my second point, my oft-mentioned mantra for the writer to raise the stakes, to take risks and push the narrative or dramatic envelope. This can mean getting out of familiar situations – indeed, defamiliarizing them, or making the old new again.
Nothing can be too strange in a world full of grotesque realities and bizarre juxtapositions. What will happen if you transpose a story set in Pasay – let’s assume the usual urchin-pickpocket setup – to, say, Paris, where the character is no longer an urchin but an OFW seduced by the glitter on display? Or do the reverse, and transform that Burger Machine stand in Baclaran into a place of mystery and wonder. You can start with something terribly trite – like two maids dusting the furniture in the opening scene – but use totally unexpected dialogue, or throw some monkey wrench into the plot (like a monkey in the window?) to take us somewhere they and we have never traveled.
Another weakness of new writers – I think especially the young – is their inability or unwillingness to deal both boldly and finely with strong emotions, for which shock or raw anger are often made to serve as substitutes. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the influence of American minimalism, which deliberately downplays emotion and prizes a certain flatness of surface and surface effects. It could also be a studied reaction to the melodrama swirling around us, in real life as on TV and the in the movies.
People cry; people scream; people throw fits; people laugh deliriously; people make love in all kinds of places; people maim and kill each other in all kinds of ways. If people don’t do any of these in your stories – if all they do is sip tepid coffee in Starbucks talking about relationships rather than actually having one or a more active one – then you’d better have a good reason. But more than their presence, it’s the quality of these experiences (and, as much, the quality of their descriptions) that matter in good realist fiction. (I’ve slipped in the R word there, "realist," simply to remind us that realism is, itself, a pose and an option.)
Sure, there are stories where seemingly nothing happens – again, easy examples are ""Hills Like White Elephants" and "Midsummer" – but that surface calm belies the roiling currents underneath, and their dramatic power (an extremely erotic power, in the case of "Midsummer") is produced precisely by the restraint employed by the author on the material.
(On a related note – and as the possible subject of another piece – let me observe the perplexing absence of sex and crime from traditional Philippine fiction in English. Given our birth and crime rates, you’d think there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on in these islands – but no, not if all you had to go by were our stories, at least until recently, with some young writers invoking the F word every other sentence, as if to make up for some historical imbalance.)
It’s too easy to conclude that people don’t write about some things because they don’t know about them, and certainly too patronizing to say that they’re too young. Absolutely not; I think the true test of writing is to write beyond your own age and your own experience, to inhabit and represent other people’s lives. Until you write them and about them, you’ll never know them.
Lastly for now, let me remark on the stubborn refusal – or maybe again, the inability – of some new writers to revise their work, even after its obvious flaws have been pointed out to them in a workshop. Everyone has a right to preserve and fight for his or her own vision and version of a story, and it’s always possible that you could be right and 20 other people – including the instructor – dead wrong.
But do that on your own time; there’ll be a lot of time for it, too, after the workshops and out of school, when you’ll have no one looking over your shoulder, guessing at your intentions and commenting on your delivery. (Hey, you might even miss it!) As far as I’m concerned, every work submitted to class or workshop – no matter how seemingly perfect (as a rare few turn out to be) – is a malleable draft.
Revision is a sign of maturity, of finally grasping and realizing the true worth of your creation. The work matures, you mature. It may not be something you can do – and it’s something you really shouldn’t do – the day after the workshop, trying to incorporate everyone’s comments to their satisfaction. Let the sting of the critiques and the euphoria of the praises pass, maybe over a week or a month – then sit down quietly and patiently to the task at hand, "killing your babies" if you have to, as Nick Joaquin so memorably suggested.
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