Writing: A business both serious and joyful

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Manuel Garcia Calleja, 69, worked as a PR writer, an advertising copywriter, account executive and tried his hand in the printing business. At present he is “a barangay lupon taga-pamayapa whose job is to settle disputes between community residents.”

A friend I had not seen since our little discussion on why he would not play tennis again popped up one Saturday at the club. He stayed just long enough to give me — before I could ask him what he was against doing this time — a document envelope and these words: “You should not write stories again.”

The envelope contained an old — more apt would be “ancient” issue of The Philippines Free Press where I had my first published story, “Her Name Is Rima.” There was also a paperback, On Writing, by Stephen King.

Several pages of King’s book were folded. Some words were encircled. Sentences, paragraphs underscored. And my story? It was a mess of deleted words, crossed-out sentences, insertions and admonitions disguised as suggestions.

Why, the SOB had edited my story!

On Writing is a “revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have.” It also delineates the “inextricable link between writing and living…” brought about by an accident that nearly ended a fantastic writing career.

Reading the book was like sitting in at a writing class. I imagined that it was King — not my friend — who had blue-penciled my story, and for three spooky nights, but without the horror, I faced the master storyteller.

For a start, King said, read a lot.

I got oodles of books, mostly fiction — Steinbeck, Asimov, Atwood, Greene, Marquez, McEwan, Hemingway, King, Murakami, among others. Sort of overwhelming, but I got to read them, bit by bit, the same way I would tackle the food on the buffet table. Which was okay, King said, as the trick is to read “in small sips” while waiting for my turn at the tennis court, or while enthroned on the john. And in “long swallows,” on dying nights when everyone’s dreaming of getting the young widow next door laid or being mounted by the street corner hunk.

I told King I read because I enjoy reading. Agreed, King replied, he too read for enjoyment and “not to study the craft.” Yet, he said, there is “a learning process in reading.” Every book has its own “lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” Poorly written books bring out what-not-to-do things and the experience helps us to recognize and avoid them when they creep into our work.

Well-written books, on the other hand, impart to the writer examples in “style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters and truth telling…” as well as create an “ease and intimacy with the process of writing…” and offer a “growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh.”

Avoid the “quacking box,” advised King. Certainly, those hokey telenovelas along with those limp-wrist talk shows (mere backyard gossips, really) and those zombie gigs where that shill in circus barker suit has been milking his herd of their last centavos in God’s name are “not apt to improve one’s life and writing.” And I agreed with King that “once weaned from the glass teat,” people will find reading more enjoyable and rewarding.

“Write a lot,” King glared at me and asked what are those unfinished fiction projects doing in my filing cabinet. I tried a “Well, it’s because of this tennis and worrying thing where my next meal’s coming from” copout but King was not buying it. “If God gives you something you can do,” he glared all the more, “why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?”

I told my friend when he returned a week after that I have exhumed from its filing cabinet grave the first draft of a story (about a girl coming back, sort of, years later to avenge, sort of, her death) and I have looked into it armed with King’s writing toolbox. If a racket topped my friend’s tennis (tool) bag, King said mine should be vocabulary, the “bread of writing.” Writers have either a large (like Lovecraft’s “…paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution…”) or simple vocabulary (like Hemingway’s “He came to the river. The river was there.”) Both work, and don’t feel inferior, King assured me, if I can’t come up with such heavies as “insalubrious dithyramb or a cozening raconteur,” for as the prosti said to the bashful gob, “It ain’t how much you got, honey, it’s how you use it.”

Then, there’s grammar, which King said by now I should know, understand or have a sense of. Or it’s too late. Yet, there is a “comforting simplicity” in the rudiments of grammar that when confronted by those “restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, appositives, and compound/complex sentences,” I just have to remember there “be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.” Thus, politicians promise (that’s all), con men (sweet) talk, cops investigate (but end up themselves being investigated. Even jailed. Pity.).

Would I be committed to a Grammar Correctional if I didn’t write complete sentences every time? Of course not, King declared. Frags and floating clauses “can work beautifully to streamline narration, create clearer images, tensions… speed up the pace of the story.” What about description? Write a “few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.” Don’t over-describe, King cautioned. And dialogue attribution? Tied up to character building, “well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb, amusing or an old sobersides.” I can portray a god spreader sham via straight narration but King said I can do it “much more vividly” if I just let the trickster command his followers, grating tongue and all, “Turn your umbrellas upside down…”

But, above all else, is the story. The story is everything. And on the table are the writing tools, the “bells and the whistles” (stream of consciousness, internal dialogue, theme, symbolism, etc.) which I can use to enhance a story; for it to fascinate, entertain, to linger in the reader’s mind. But if all I can get from one or two of the “whistles and bells” (say, symbolism) is a sense of “artificial profundity,” King said there is the rewrite where I can kill my darlings, much as I adore them.

My friend gave me on his second visit a newspaper clipping about a writing workshop. Now, if by a freak miracle I get to attend one, I’d surely be like the kid that I was in math class, imploring the gods to make me invisible in the back row. I’d be dumbfounded when asked, “What’s the significance of the red shoes?” (God, haven’t thought about it!) that I’d just offer to change the red shoes to black, or amputate the legs, or kill off the character na lang. I’d be just as dumbfounded when called upon to critique a story, and all I’d be able to mumble is what King said was “maddeningly vague.” Perhaps: “I love the feeling of the story… it had something… a sense of I don’t know.”

Writing, King said as we parted on the third night, is not about becoming famous, getting the girls, or making a bundle (not here, anyway) but about being fulfilled, about “enriching the lives of (your) readers,” as well as your own. It’s both a serious and joyful business. It demands lots and lots of reading and writing, and if I can’t or won’t, King said, I might as well do something else.

Like whacking a small fuzzy ball back and forth, back and forth, on the tennis court.