To the young writer: Be your own toughest critic

At the end of the school year, universities with writing courses sponsor workshops, enticing young writers to compete for admission. The competition is often intense and the young writer admitted to such a workshop considers it an honor, the first step to recognition, followed by publication and possibly winning an award in the annual Palanca Literary Contest.

Incidentally, the Palanca Awards is the longest inclusive and most expensive private effort crucial to the enrichment of Philippine culture. I salute the Palancas for this singular effort which, I know, has no equivalent in the region.

Workshops do not necessarily make good writers. The most they do is provide a venue for them to meet one another and their elders as well. They promote social bonding. And for the teachers a bit more money, too.

Most of the teachers in these workshops are unqualified. They may be good teachers but there is this old saying that “he who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” They maybe adorned with Ph.D’s but they have no track record as creative writers. In fact, it is only writers like Gilda Cordero Fernando, Gregorio Brillantes, Rony Diaz, Menchu Sarmiento, Bambi Harper, Chayong Lucero and Charlson Ong who should be teaching creative writing primarily because they know.

Every so often, I get writers asking me to look at their manuscripts not so much as a novelist but as an editor. In my experience as one, it is not necessary for an editor to read an entire manuscript; usually, the first five pages are already an indication of the writer’s talent as evidenced by his language. Any writer must be precise in his use of words. This requires a vast vocabulary from which this precision emerges.

I am also often asked to give writing lessons because they do not see me in the workshops.

Is there a conspiracy among these second-rate writers turned academics to keep away our best creative writers from the young? Or are they so insecure, so protective of their turf?

Sometime back, that beautiful novelist Bienvenido N. Santos told me he wanted very much to lecture or teach writing at the University of the Philippines where he graduated. That invitation never came. Ben need not have bothered about that snub. Now, the Creative Writing Center at De La Salle University is named after him.

A bit of background on these workshops. They started in the campuses in the United States shortly after World War II with tacit support from the acolytes of the New Criticism. This literary fad was ushered by writers like John Crowe Ransom of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The college publishes the literary journal, The Kenyon Review. I met Mr. Ransom in 1955 when I first went to the United States. I wanted to know more about the New Criticism and I had dinner at his house with some of his colleagues. They explained what the New Criticism was, the primal prominence of the text, the use of metaphors, irony, how important it was for writers to conform with its tenets. Looking back at that evening, I did not really learn much and was, in fact, bored for I expected something more relevant and profound, the erudite answers to my questions about literature and art, the why of it all.

Now, given this distance, what I recall most about my visit was what Mr. Ransom showed me — his carpentry in the basement of his house. He was very proud of the fact that he was working with Philippine mahogany. I looked at it — it was the common tangile which, at the time in Manila, we often used as firewood. It was also on the way to Gambier, through a stretch of a country road, that I first encountered the powerful stench of a dead skunk.

NVM Gonzalez, Edith and Edilberto Tiempo of Sillliman went to the United States at the time and returned to Manila as stout disciples of the New Criticism.

May I digress here. NVM and his wife Narita Manuel were personal friends; as editor of the defunct Saturday Evening News Magazine, NVM published several of my short stories. Edith and Ed Tiempo were personal friends, too.

NVM gave a lecture on the New Criticism at the University of Santo Tomas soon after my return. After that lecture, I never attended any lecture by him again; if I followed his advice, I would never have written the Rosales Saga and other novels, shackled as I would be by the rigid regimen he advocated. The New Criticism has long been abandoned in America but it seems to flourish in the Philippines still. The latest literary trend in Post-Colonialism and even this is about to fade.

In the United States writing workshops continue to be popular. The result has been a steady deterioration of the quality of literature. This is the observation of American critics themselves. It is evident in the lack of originality, narrative tension in much of contemporary American writing. This decay is most pronounced in American poetry, its pedestrian condition and vapid homogenization. I should know; I order a lot of creative writing from all over for my bookshop. The age of the great writers who never attended workshops — Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer  — it’s all over. Their brilliant work is now replaced by flashy exposition, pseudo-complex narration of wanton infidelities and the asinine trivia of suburbia.

Writer conferences, classes in literature are, of course, strictly another matter. In conferences, writers get to meet one another. They merge into those inevitable coteries, core arguments, and most important, they form a community and, hopefully, if and when necessary, they band together to protect their rights and those of their fellowmen.

Literature courses are necessary, too, so that students will get to know their own culture and the culture of other people. Literature will enrich students intellectually, enable them to understand better their own humanity.

A very good literature teacher is also capable of imparting to his students techniques in craftsmanship, first correct grammar, precision with words, all the elements that make for readability. This craftsmanship is essential for after the writer has mastered the craft, then — with originality, creativity, imagination and intuition — he is transformed into an artist. That transformation can never fructify in workshops — it is something the artist must develop in himself, for it is impossible to teach originality, creativity, imagination — these are innate qualities the artist must evolve from his deepest being. This most precious alchemy that transforms craftsmanship into art is brewed in himself through experience and living.

It is so easy to distinguish the literary work of academics and non-academics. Academics are so concerned with craft, they bind themselves with rules, with pretentious attempts at originality. Almost always they fail for they are hobbled by their experience and their egos inflated by their Ph.D’s.

This explains why their novels are almost always boring. As they say in cooking, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In literature, too; the proof of the writing is in the reading.

The academic community can also be an incestuous cabal. This is one reason why a critical tradition has yet to emerge from it. Personal relationships dull critical perception. “You scratch my back, I scratch yours” pervades the culture. For this reason I value more the criticism of foreigners who don’t know me personally, whose judgments are based on my texts, not on my person.

To the best of my knowledge, Nick Joaquin attended only one workshop and never attended one again. He couldn’t stand seeing a young writer cry after he had critiqued her work.

Every writer should be able to be his own bitterest critic.

When I was much younger I was writing very fast so I could sell my stories quickly, too. In later years, as my income improved, when finished, I put them in the freezer and brought them out after a month of two; I read them again with a fresh attitude, saw the flaws and corrected them.

It is usual for me to excise whole paragraphs, pages even — each word in them carefully chosen — from a story or a novel because on closer reading, I do not see their relevance or organic connection. Writing is hard work; I type or write in longhand the first draft of a novel which usually runs to about 600 pages. Each undergoes as much as eight or nine drafts. Even when the manuscript is already in book form, I still correct it so that the succeeding print runs always have new corrections.

I used to throw away my drafts until former National Library director Serafin Quiazon told me to keep them for future study. Librarians Josefina S. Galleon and Allan L. Tan are now cataloguing my manuscripts before installing them in the La Salle Library. They now realize the tenacious drudgery that shaped those novels and short stories.

After all these many years as editor, I am now able to categorize our writers in English under this ranking: minor minor, major minor, minor major, major major.

In any case, as Nick Joaquin said, the best critic is time. If a novel survives for a hundred years like Rizal’s novels, it must be good; it becomes a classic.

I am happy to note that the novels The Pretenders and Tree which I wrote 50 years ago are still being read. I hope they will continue to be read like Rizal’s. It is to him, after all, that I owe so much. I hope, too, that all young Filipinos will read Rizal like I did and remember: he never attended workshops. But he knew himself well enough to criticize not only his writing but the apathy of his countrymen and, above all, Spanish tyranny.