One for the underdogs
August 1, 2005 | 12:00am
Let me take advantage of this week’s space to share and respond to a number of messages I’ve been receiving, related to my recent series of column-pieces on various aspects of writing. Except for the last two readers, I’ll use pseudonyms for those who wrote in – you know who you are, and many thanks.
From James in Cebu comes this question: "What’s the ideal length for a novel?" I’ll give you a short answer and a long one. The short one is, it depends on the writer’s skill and on what he or she has to say; for a bad writer, 10 pages would be too long; for a good one, 500 pages would barely be enough. For the long answer, use Google and find a blog titled "Grumpy Old Bookman," rated by The Guardian among the 10 best literary blogs out there. I’ll just quote a few paragraphs from this erudite fellow’s notes:
"There are many examples of short books which have embedded themselves in the folk memory of readers. The Time Machine (Wells) runs to about 80 pages in most editions; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) is 70 pages.
"Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) was written in nine days on a hired typewriter and the first edition contained 158 pages. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) has 172 pages. Bonjour Tristesse (Sagan) has 30,000 words, and Georges Simenon built a whole career on novels of a similar length. The Bridges of Madison County (Waller) is shown as 180 pages on Amazon, but I believe that too is about 30,000 words. So is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, if you want a literary example; the book received special recognition in his Nobel Prize citation.
"Hemingway, by the way, offered the following advice: ‘Eschew the monumental. Shun the epic.’
"Enough. We have demonstrated that you do not have to grind on for 250,000 words to make a powerful impression on the average reader, or, for that matter, on those who decide on the next Nobel Prize winner."
Another reader we’ll call Dick, who comes from a downtown university, wrote in to say, "I have this impression that the literature students of UP, Ateneo, UST, Silliman, and De La Salle are more fortunate in having literary legacies that have become their continuing feat, sustaining and preserving their prestige by consistently winning competitions and holding national workshops. And believe me, I have nothing against it. I am very proud that these universities became sentinels of Philippine Lit. What I worry about is the bata-bata system in different literary competitions such as the most esteemed and coveted Palanca Awards."
Well, Dick, that suspicion about favoritism and patronage in the Palancas is an old and persistent one, and I don’t mean to offend you by saying that I usually hear it from perennial losers who ultimately have no other explanation to fall back on than the conviction that there must be an elitist cabal out there conspiring to deny them their due.
Sure, there are literary barkadas just as in any other profession, and sure, their members may personally favor work in a certain style. But it doesn’t mean that, in a judging situation, they’ll merely choose their protégés, however unworthy. The Palancas have made it a point to recruit a healthy mix of people on every panel of judges, precisely to prevent the unjust triumph of substandard work, as much as possible.
From what I’ve heard in over a decade of judging for the Palancas, some misguided judges have indeed tried to bend the rules to favor their pets – and miserably failed. One towering literary figure was supposed to have announced to his fellow judges that he was reserving the choice of first prize to himself, leaving second and third to his juniors; they protested vigorously, and he was forced to resign. Another judge reportedly came with a ruler to measure margins to the millimeter, presumably to disqualify entries he disliked; he, too, was overruled by more sensible minds. Most judges have better things to do and better things in mind than promoting mediocrity – like the pride and honor of recognizing new talent.
Whoever the judge, it’s in the nature of art and literature for certain predispositions to prevail at any given time, and to be challenged by contrapuntal voices which might well become the next orthodoxy. A word of advice to the Palanca-stricken: Write what suits you, not what you think will suit the judges, whom you wouldn’t know beforehand, anyway. The labor of the artifice will show, I guarantee you, and if you lose as you probably will, you’ll have lost not only the contest but also your own precious voice.
"I raise a toast to the underdogs! I can understand a teacher’s anguished desolation and pangs of longing for The One, a la Neo of The Matrix or Tolkien’s Frodo, to turn up in this year’s latest crop of freshmen. Like all gems of value, rough diamonds are few and oh so rare. Long and arduous is an erudite instructor’s climb up the ladder of polish and accomplishment and I doubt there were any warning signs that the attendant curse is intellectual isolation and perhaps, at least more often than anyone would care to admit, too wide a streak of cynicism. There being no heralds to signal our arrival, we uneventfully arrive at our professional destinations and find, lo and behold – to our honest surprise and bewilderment – that we are quite alone. Aye there’s the rub! Overachievers – writers included – only stand out and can only stand out as singular exceptions against a massed tableau, a sea of nondescript average run-of-the-mill students.
"I count myself as one of the average. I won no prizes, no awards, no ribbons, nothing. I plodded on in my bewildered way through grade school, high school, and college. There was nothing at all on which to hang a claim to distinction. Throughout those years I knew that there were those among my mentors who’d weighed me and in the end found me wanting. Though not in so many words, I picked up their disappointment.
"In grade school, I was puzzled for the only contests were in areas like grades in my report card (for which I cared little about) and in those areas I cared about, like wanting to know more about Booth Tarkington (this was in B.I. era, that is, Before Internet), William Golding, Rachel Carson, and what the heck was satire and why Shel Silverstein’s great satire was found in my father’s Playboy magazines, I dared not speak up. (If I wasn’t smart enough to march to the academic tempos at least I had enough smarts not to get crucified.) And so it was I’d failed my mentors.
"I admit I’d portaged that stifling load of scholastic guilt so long and well it would have put a Sherpa to shame (allusion intended). Thankfully there came a day when it dawned on me that I was, here goes the cliché, free to be myself, the standards of all and sundry, pardon me for saying so, be damned.
"Like the view from the mountaintop, the words and works of the gifted take our breaths away and inspire us (there’s a contradiction there!) to reach beyond our grasp. Well and good, but what about the rest of us? While it would be ridiculous to suggest lowering the bar of accomplishment to accommodate hoi polloi, we should remember that excellence is a relative term, which denotes surpassing a given benchmark. As such it can also be read as progress, forward movement from any starting point. In this then will agree with you: So long as I had a mentor’s hand in eking, pounding, cajoling, and even threatening it out of a young mind, I’ll take the ragged and soulful story any day with no gainsaying. I toast the underdogs and I toast to their freedom! You might perhaps remind them that in getting there, "getting" counts just as much as ‘there’."
All I can say is, not bad for an "underdog," Dennis. Here’s another glass to you.
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