Novelists at work
In preparation for a lecture I gave at the University of the Philippines last week as a long preface of sorts to the launching of my new novel Soledad’s Sister, I undertook a small, private survey of some friends who had written novels, to find out what their own experiences were. Four writers responded: Charlson Ong (CO), Cristina “Jing” Pantoja-Hidalgo (JH), Vince Groyon (VG), and Dean Alfar (DA). I used portions of their responses for my lecture, but it seemed such a waste to just set the rest of the material aside, given how revealing it was in terms of how writers think and work, so I secured their permission to publish the full answers here, slightly edited. This will spill over to next Monday’s column, so wait for that one, too.
1. How many novels have you written/published?
Charlson Ong: I have written two novels — An Embarrassment of Riches (published in 2000) and Banyaga (2007).
Jing
Vince Groyon: Just the one — The Sky over Dimas in 2003.
Dean Alfar: One (
2. What led you to write a novel (instead of, say, a collection of stories)?
CO: My first, An Embarrassment of Riches, was something I wanted to do for the Philippine centennial year (in 1998; it subsequently won the million-peso prize for the novel in the Centennial competition — BD). When a contest was announced I had an added incentive to finish it. It is my personal reflection on the Philippine past and future and place in
JH: Stories I had been writing since childhood. I wanted to be like the heroines of the novels I read as a very young girl (Little Women, Girl of the Limberlost, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, etc.) who all wanted to be writers. The novels — I guess all writers of fiction dream of writing a novel.
VG: Edith Tiempo’s parting words to me at the 1992 Silliman workshop were “Vince, you should write a novel.” It’s something I’ve thought of doing since I was a kid (I was obsessed with the Book of Lists, which had a list of authors who wrote books in their childhood). The final push came when I had to do a thesis to complete my MFA-Creative Writing at DLSU. By that time, in my head the novel had become a kind of acid test for fiction writers; I felt that I couldn’t really call myself a fiction writer unless I had written one (no offense to short story masters).
DA: For a long time, I thought that only older, established writers with tons of credentials and experience had the right to write a novel. But a few years ago, I decided to try my hand at it, even if, I thought, I had nothing earthshaking to say. It coincided with the NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month), which gave me the necessary discipline to complete a novel online. I posted each portion as I finished it, warts and all.
3. How long did it take you to finish, and what kinds of problems did you encounter in finishing it? In the end, was it the novel you had imagined at the beginning?
JH: My first novel (Recuerdo) took years and years. It started out as something entirely different and morphed several times. In the form in which it was eventually published, maybe two years. The second novel (A Book of Dreams) went faster. I pretty much knew what I wanted it to be — which was an experiment in something I had never done before, and don’t think anyone had done before. It was just a question of painstaking revisions and re-revisions. I must admit I’m a little disappointed that this book has not attracted the sort of attentive readings that has been enjoyed by Recuerdo. I really am not sure if it’s any good, and would have appreciated comments from people I respect.
I think it’s a sad thing that most of us don’t have time to read each other, even our friends.
VG: About three or four years of on-and-off writing (including a chapter completed several years before), but it all came down to that one month when I locked myself into my apartment. A few more months of (rather major) revision followed after it won the Palanca, and then I submitted it for publication to (the now-defunct) DLSU Press. My difficulty in finishing it was that I had grown bored with it — having outlined obsessively for years, I knew it inside out and where it was going to go. Thus I resisted having to get the words on the page — it had become a chore. They say Hitchcock was always bored on the set because being a storyboarder, he had already directed the movie in his mind; I’d say my situation was similar. This is why I now believe that novelists ought to just wade into the writing with very little planning (perhaps just character back stories and some basic history for the world of the novel in question) and allow the project to go where it needs to go, unlike a short story writer, because the short story demands absolute control over the material. In the end, it wasn’t at all the novel I imagined at the beginning. I realized that I didn’t have the chops to write a full-on historical novel, and that I had no idea how to attack the problem of narratorial (?) voice for sections set in the past, nor the skill to pull it off. I settled instead on something grounded in a “present time” looking back at the past, because this is what my skills could handle. I also threw away the original non-linear structure that I had designed for it, which was based on a pre-colonial agricultural calendar, because it was ultimately too pretentious. This entailed rewriting substantial chunks of the narrative, and writing new material as well.
DA: One month. My big hurdle was the very notion of the vast novelistic space that I needed to fill up. Nothing in my training as a short story writer, playwright, or comic book writer prepared me for that. It was very intimidating and I was concerned I’d use up everything I knew and had to say in the first 20,000 words or so. In the end, my novel surprised me (happily, whatever other failings I have as a writer are cleverly disguised by language, LOL).
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
