The way we wrote

Last Friday, on the first day of the three-day Philippine Readers & Writers Festival 2016 organized by National Book Store and Raffles Makati Hotel, four of us older creative writers were grouped together for a panel session billed as “The Way We Wrote: Was Literature And Writing So Different Before?”

The much younger (and certainly more alluring) Danton Remoto, our fellow-columnist here in the  Philippine STAR, except that he now resides in the Op-Ed section, served as moderator.

Our fellow-columnist in this section, Jose Y. “Butch” Dalisay Jr., was scheduled to speak first, followed by Cristina “Jing” Pantoja Hidalgo, then Gémino H. “Jimmy” Abad, with me bringing up the rear — maybe because I lack the pedigree of a Ph.D.

Ani Habulan of Anvil Publishing, Inc. suggested that if we were to make slide presentations, PowerPoint use would be preferable. Sir Butch immediately nixed the idea on behalf of everyone, correctly so.

Ten minutes each for us panelists certainly wouldn’t require any visual aids to verbally wing it, that is, personally sharing with the expected audience “of teachers/educators, writers, librarians and literature buffs… the highlights of Philippine creative writing years ago and what we can learn from them today.”

As of this writing, I was still unsure of what I could offer as to what was different in our writing then, in our leaner and meaner years, from the writing presently being done.

I could say that basically, there shouldn’t be much difference, given that good writing will always require some amount of intelligence, a good grasp of the language being utilized and a freshness of imagination that would render one’s articulation distinct or unique.

And since it hasn’t been more than a few decades since we of the older generation started wielding English the way we learned it with a certain degree of proficiency, it can’t be claimed that the language itself has changed much, unlike, say, if one were to compare its use over several centuries.

Oh, there would be significantly new entries in today’s vocabulary, particularly having to do with technological advances, as well as pop neologisms. But by and large, grammar and syntax would not have undergone as remarkable a shift as from analogue to digital.

I thought as well: I could hope that none of the earlier speakers in our panel would point this out, that basically, the difference in the way we wrote then, in the ’60s to the ’80s, was more in terms of the physical tools at our command.

We all punched at the heavy keys of a typewriter, whereas now we all use computers, mostly laptops, and as far as our panel goes, unanimously of the Apple brand. It took some time to get where we are now with our MacAirs or MacBook Pros.

We had to go up that technological learning curve and give up the old heavy-set Remingtons, Underwoods and Smith-Coronas for lighter, tin-canny portables, maybe moved on to electric typewriters and eventually learned to use keyboards that were separated from the greenish screens of early computers.

I do miss the Smith-Coronas, et al. There was physical passion involved in typing out a poem, story, article, essay or thesis when we were still mechanically bound. You had to feed a blank sheet into the carriage, wind up the platen knob to see its top end appear from under the black cylinder that was the feed roller, arrange the margins and indentions, before you punched vigorously at the keys.

You got to the end of a line, and you took a swipe at a lever that resembled the right-hand extension of the old casino slot machine called the one-armed bandit. Except that the typewriter’s carriage return lever seemed to have favored southpaws.

Apart from mastering the conduct of handling ribbons and ribbon spools, including reversion and fitting in carbon paper to ensure instant multiple copies, you also had to learn to apply Snopake Correction Fluid, before the much more handy white out or Wite-Out Correction Tape came into use. Both were the antidote to typos. But when quick-hindsight revision or editing demanded the insertion of a phrase or line, that’s when your early decision to type double-space, or triple-space, proved sagacious.

When a large chunk of text called for total rewrite, here’s where the vintage exercise with a good old typewriter still has me wishing for occasional throwback time.

In utter annoyance at your pedestrian prose or the vacuum in your verse, you gave up on the page, tore it right out of the carriage, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into a corner, preferably where a trash can lay in wait. I swear that my skill at the three-point shot in a hardcourt came to good use in wiping away the frustration with uncanny accuracy.

So that’s how we wrote, in earlier days.

Then, of course, there was the matter of influences. In our teens, we tried to write like Hemingway and e.e. Cummings, then like Borges and Eliot. Aye, there’s the difference. I suppose these days most young writers try their best to channel Haruki Murakami and — heavens, no! — Lang Leav.

Ah, of course, there’s material or what offered itself contemporaneously for the times. I guess that makes for a lot of difference between writing then and writing now. All of us in the panel have drawn from the Martial Law years for our prose and poetry both. Just as I would expect the young writers today, well, even the old ones, to still be making up their minds on how to draw from contemporary history.

Already, a much younger writer-friend from the South has been digitally anthologizing what he calls The Kill List Chronicles, and makes it available on social media. Oh, yes, soc med can be considered a game changer in providing easy access to influences and biases both, to peals of delight as much as rants of hate. Material ba kamo? I could say that our old materiales fuertes have been randomized as possible cornucopia, if not errant glut.

Soc med certainly didn’t help us along in the past century. We were much more isolated as writers then. We only got to trade material, influence (including books), and actual manuscripts in the flesh, eye-balling one another on streetcorners, in campuses, in beerhouses.

Lastly, then of course as primary difference, there’s been the proliferation of more genres. We didn’t even write creative non-fiction then, but simply what were called personal essays. Now you have them tumbling out of an embarassment of blogs. Chick lit was non-existent. Spec fict meant trying your hand out occasionally on a Bradbury take. The romance novel was also historical and heroic, such as Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.

These days, the graphic novel is much in demand. Steampunk has surfaced on the horizon of literature. And when it comes to poetry, very happily has there been much of mutation, or randomization.

It’s remarkable to hear young poets engaging in Spoken Word. Now a writer not only has to apply lines on paper, but etch them in memory, ready to recite extended pieces like the ancient bards or troubadours.

Rap also excites the ears and other senses. And now we understand that there is value to so-called hugot lines.

Hooray for these genre additions to creative writing. It may yet make up for occasional deficiency in distinguishing between “your” and “you’re.” And oh yes, we were never “bias” in our choices of material, influences or genres. Some of us in our generation scribbled lines on the white side of the tinfoil found in cigarette packs. These days an MRT rider pulls out her/his cellphone and commits those literary lines to posterity with the adroitness of a single thumb.

Yes, creative writing moves on like the timeworn and sometimes dependable trains that rumble on above EDSA. On occasion, riders are forced to disembark and walk alongside the tracks when a glitch occurs. But we all get back onboard when we can, hoping to thwart the evil designs of heavy traffic as we get on with our lives.