INTRODUCTION TO CREATIVE WRITING READINGS

1. Butch Dalisay, “The writerly thing”

2. Scott Lee Chua, “Writing for the Palanca”
3. Gemino Abad, “A Poetics of the Literary Work”
4. Vim Nadera, “Tanghalinghaga”
5. Roberto Añ onuevo, “Ang Wika ng Tula”
6. Edith Tiempo, “Bonsai”
7. Grace R. Monte de Ramos, “Brave Woman”
8. Federico Licsi Espino, “Lizards”
9. Luis Joaquin Katigbak, “Slouching Towards Story”
10. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, “When It’s A Grey November In Your Soul”
11. Estrella Alfon, “Magnificence”
12. Luis Joaquin Katigbak, “Document”
13. Butch Dalisay, “Biographies of the Ordinary”
14. Jessica Zafra, “Deconstructing Imelda”
15. John Jack Wigley, “Departures”
16. Gideon Lasco, “Habal-habal dreaming”

The writerly thing

PENMAN - Butch Dalisay -
June 28, 2004 | 12:00am

People often ask me what it’s like to be a writer, and I’ve dutifully answered that question
more than once in this column. This week I’d like to play around a bit with that idea by
talking about what I think writers should be or be like.

I don’t mean how they should speak, or dress, or what liquor, if any, they should imbibe. In their
burning desire to be writers – something I’ve always fancied since I was a kid – some people
start with the trappings, with how they imagine writers might look or behave.

Unfortunately there seems to be something of a tradition of picturing writers (and other artists) as
talented but loud, conceited, and basically insufferable boors who take infrequent baths and even
more infrequent haircuts, who ingest all manner of dubious and very possibly illegal substances,
who will gladly couple with anything that vaguely manifests the same inclination (or not), and
who like to say "pontificate" (or, worse, just go ahead and pontificate) where lesser mortals just
might be happy with "speak."

And then there’s the mumbo-jumbo some people attach to the act of writing – the lighting of
candles, the playing of music, the use of a certain chair, a certain computer, or a certain table.

Let me try and cut through this miasma of misconceptions by suggesting what it takes to be
writerly. By this I mean that possessing the following traits may or may not make you a writer,
but you’ll be a lot closer to thinking and acting like one, based not only on my own experience
but also on that of many writers I know. (And by "writerly" I don’t mean the sense in which it’s
been used by the theorist Roland Barthes, to describe texts that call attention to the very artifice
that produced them.)

First, let me tell you what I think a good creative writer is. For me, that’s someone who sees
things in a situation that others can’t or didn’t, and who can present those nuances – through the
masterful use of words – with a compelling credibility. (Note that I say "credibility" instead of
"fidelity" or "authenticity"; the important thing in creative writing is to be believable, rather than
to be factual. You create a scene not because it happened or just as it happened, but as if it
happened.)

What we’re really talking about here is something called "defamiliarization" – a way of looking
at familiar objects or situations and turning them over in such a way that they seem suddenly
new. While writers can appear to create something totally new – such as a colony on Planet ABC
in Galaxy XYZ in the 29th century, where the natives have self-regenerating heads that
communicate telepathically, etc. – these novelties are meaningful to us only insofar as they relate
to something we already know; in other words, in fiction or drama, a talking giraffe or Jabba the
Hut is still a human in disguise (although they have to be believably strange as well).

But it’s the twist in the familiar that enables us to accept plain truths that we may otherwise resist
or ignore, maybe because they’re too unpleasant, too disturbing, or too mind-boggling. One of
my favorite descriptions of art and the way it works is that of art as "the mirror of Perseus,"
which refers to Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, looking directly into whose eyes would kill the
gazer. So Perseus used his burnished shield – which captured and defanged the Gorgon’s
murderous image – to direct his lethal sword. Through the medium of art – whether it be
literature, painting, or music – we are able to deal with truths so powerful that they could hurt us.

Okay, enough of our little digression. What should a writer have or do?

First, a love of words, a fascination with their origins, meanings, and uses. I don’t mean that you
should be a walking dictionary or thesaurus – just someone who’s naturally interested in the
names of things, and who has a mental (or even a literal) notebook where you can store these
words. As an adolescent growing up in Pasig, I used to spend an hour or two after school at the
Rizal Provincial Library, where I would flip idly through the pages of the big fat Webster’s
dictionary, picking up words I would never use (like "fennec: a North African fox") but didn’t
mind meeting. It gave me a sense of a world much larger than myself, which I looked forward to
exploring on my own two feet.

Second, a love of books and reading. There’s no other or better way you can learn about words
and how they behave except by reading – perhaps omnivorously at the beginning, then more
selectively as your preferences develop and your standards improve. I never tire of telling
students who ask me for a silver bullet that to write well, they first have to read well. (Sadly, my
own reading has been the worst casualty of my working life, and I can feel, acutely, the sense of
being left farther and farther behind. Sometimes, opening the pages of a brilliant new book
causes me envy and grief, and an intense longing to write my own – but that’s another story.)

Third, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the way things work. We can’t get everything
by direct experience, but we can pick up books (cheap, at Booksale and the like) on
woodworking, jewelry, macramé, gardening, automotive mechanics, and New Zealand – in other
words, things we may not be too interested in ourselves, or think about on ordinary days. You
should want to know how things are made (other than babies) – dim sum, wristwatches, doilies,
sonatas – and be able to describe complicated processes in clear, simple steps and words. Instead
of just pondering grand abstractions like love, justice, and freedom, you should cultivate a sense
of the materiality of things, which can and will stand as the concrete manifestations (T.S. Eliot’s
"objective correlative") of our sometimes inchoate or inexpressible ideas and emotions.

Fourth, an empathy for people, a sense of how they think, feel, and act, and a keen understanding
of the workings of human relationships. It all comes down to people; everything else is décor.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that the good writer needs a very dry eye – a natural skepticism, a
refusal to take things at face value – and this especially applies to our characters, who may be
romantic but about whom we ourselves cannot afford to be romantic. At the same time, the
writer can’t be unfeeling; I can’t think of a great story that depended on wit alone, and certainly
not on cynicism. Credible and insightful creative writing requires a degree of emotional maturity,
which will enable the writer to understand, intuitively, why people act the way they do – and, in
the most interesting cases, act against all logical expectations.

Fifth, a sense of narrative, a desire and the ability to reconstruct what happened or may have
happened. The philosopher Susan Langer once described man as "the sense-making animal,"
suggesting that we got ahead of the other species because of our ability to connect the dots (i.e.,
if we drive large prey over the cliff, they’ll fall to their deaths, and we’ll have food for a week). I
keep asking my fiction students, "Where’s the story? Where’s the story?" By that I mean, if we
all looked at a scene where there’s an open door and a half-finished meal on the table and a
calendar with a corner torn off, what possible story could we imagine leading to this scene, and
where could it possibly go? You should have a sense of the continuity and the connections of
things – and also of one most significant and inexorable narrative at the core of everything.

Sixth, a faith in one’s art and in its ability to deal with the most complicated human issues and
concerns on its own terms. If you like arguing about the human condition in terms of concepts
like race, gender, and ethnicity, go ahead and write a critical essay, which can be an art in itself
and requires no less of an imagination. But if you’re, say, a short story writer and you come
across a story whose politics you can’t agree with, I would suggest that the sharper and smarter
option would be to write your own story, your own take on the same situation. Don’t get mad –
get even, in the best way you know how. We fictionists and poets may need to resort to critical
papers at some point as an academic obligation or contribution, but our best arguments and
sharpest critiques are those driven by the logic of artistic intuition and imagination.

Now that’s beginning to sound like a paper, so let me quit while I’m ahead.
***
There are a few people to whose literary judgment and wisdom I will blindly and gladly defer,
and one of them is my karaoke buddy Pete Lacaba, who sent me the following note in response
to last week’s column about "different than", etc.:

"The earliest OED citation for the use of ‘different than’ is from a 1644 work. That’s according
to Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989). In addition to ‘different from’ and ‘different
than,’ there’s a third locution that likely to grate on Philippine ears: ‘different to.’ And it gives an
example from no less than E.M. Forster in A Room with a View, 1908: ‘...Perhaps gentlemen are
different to what they were when I was young...’

"Here’s what Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has to say on the subject:

"‘These three phrases can be very simply explained: different from is the most common and is
standard in both British and American usage; different than is standard in American and British
usage, especially when a clause follows than, but is more frequent in American; different to is
standard in British usage but rare in American usage.

"‘...Different than ... has become a favorite topic of 20th-century comment. In the first half of the
century different than was regularly condemned. In the second half some still condemn it, but a
majority find it acceptable to introduce a clause, because insisting on from in such instances
often produces clumsy or wordy formulations. But there is still quite a bit of residual hostility to
than, especially when it is followed by a noun or pronoun.

"And here’s Joseph Heller, American, in Catch-22, 1961: ‘Life in cadet school for Major Major
was no different than life had been for him all along.’"

Thanks a bunch, Pete, for that erudite explanation!

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