My eager response
October 14, 2002 | 12:00am
The past week being the end of the semester for most universities, I’ve been receiving the usual barrage of requests from students all over the archipelago – wherever people can send and get e-mail – asking for my help with their literature term papers, which just happen to be about something I’ve written (most often my novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, or a short story like "In the Garden" or "Heartland").
It’s all very flattering to actually be read by someone outside my own family and circle of friends, and – like I think I’ve already said here at least once before – I appreciate every new reader, willing or not, and wish him or her a pleasant read. But I simply can’t spend a good part of my working day answering questions about my writings – and I shouldn’t, and I won’t.
When I do find the time to respond to these perplexed and desperate messages (one of which rather charmingly ended with "Hoping for your eager response"), and on behalf of all my writer-friends similarly besieged, I send the student a note like the one below. I’m printing it here as a kind of manifesto, and I keep it in its own file on my hard drive to cut, paste, and post to the next hapless reader of Jose Dalisay’s unhappy fiction, whom we shall call perplexed@homework.com:
"Dear Perplexed,
"Thank you very much for your message, and for taking the time and trouble to read my work. I’m always happy to have another reader, and I’m sorry if your teacher’s assignment has brought you to the brink of despair in trying to understand what I was saying in that piece.
"You asked me what the theme of my story was, what its symbols were, and what they meant. And, while I was at it, could I kindly provide a summary or synopsis of the story, just to make sure that you would get exactly what I had in mind? You also requested a list of my other works, along with a brief résumé and a picture of myself that you could append to your report.
"May I ask you, in turn, to please be patient with this reply, which is not an easy one to make and could, in fact, be longer than a quick and simple answer to your questions.
"I don’t mean to be rude or unhelpful – I’m acutely aware that Filipino writers can scarcely afford to lose the precious few readers they already have by disdaining them or quarreling with them – but I’ll have to beg off from answering most of the questions you raised, for the reasons I’m going to give below.
"As a teacher myself, and as a writer, of course, I’ve always believed that a writer’s job is to write, a student’s job is to read, and a teacher’s job is to help the student turn reading into knowledge. A writer who tries to explain his work usurps the jobs of both student and teacher, and renders them subordinate or even irrelevant to the writer’s own understanding and opinion of his or her work. For who will believe a lowly student, or even a brilliant teacher (or, as often emerges, a brilliant student), whose interpretation of a poem or story differs from that of the writer, once the writer has spoken?
"The writer speaks once and only once, and that is in, through, and with the work itself. In fact, it is not even the writer’s person, which can be very dull and unpleasant, that speaks, but his or her heightened intuition, his or her deep-felt apprehension of the marvelous in the commonplace. Please mark that word: It is an ‘apprehension,’ a sense, a learned suspicion – not a boxed and labeled certainty, which is always, or should be, beyond the writer’s reach.
"This means, dear Perplexed, that if I knew very clearly from the start what I had to say about the world in my story, then I would not have bothered to write the story, but an essay, or something like this that you can digest in one sitting and locate and mark the thesis statement of with a highlighter. I write fiction because I think the story will lead me and my reader to some truth in a roundabout way, and the pleasure has always lain more in the pursuit of it than in the truths themselves (which can be very harsh and depressing). You can’t know what that truth is until you look for it in fiction and by the means of fiction, which, in its own strange way, does that by a bit of very clever lying, by pretending that some things happened when they never really did.
"That brings me to one of your questions, brought up by many others like you: ‘Did it really happen?’ This one I will choose to answer: yes, of course it did – but in the story, on the page, which is the only ‘reality’ that counts for the moment. That’s different from asking ‘Do these things happen in real life?’ or ‘What does this story say about our people and society?’, which are also worth talking about. I suspect, however, that what you want to know is whether the events in my story really happened to me, in my own life. For that I’ll ask you in turn: Beyond its curiosity value, what does it matter if it did or didn’t? Do you have to die to write about death? Do you have to have been imprisoned to write about prison? The fact is that dead people don’t write stories, and there are hundreds of thousands of people languishing in prison every day, with just a very few of them ever becoming writers, and fewer still good writers.
"Does direct experience make a story any better or any richer? Perhaps yes, through more authentic detail. But that’s every writer’s challenge – to evoke the setting and the mood of a certain reality without necessarily having seen it; or, having seen it, to render it vividly, in fine detail, or to embellish and even distort it according to some design. (Oddly enough, the distortion of a subject can define it even more sharply.) Personal experience gives us story ideas, material, and sources, but it’s the writer’s vision and craft – the truly important must-haves – that transform them into living fiction.
"I don’t provide synopses of my work because every synopsis is already a reading, an interpretation, and you should come up with your own. If I wrote something that’s far too vague or simply doesn’t make sense, then say so; it could very well be my fault. Writers can make awful mistakes (my protagonist’s name changed once, right in the middle of a published story), or write some pretty awful passages. That doesn’t absolve you from doing a little research or something so simple as looking up a word in the dictionary. (Here’s one quick tip about how writers become writers: They fall in love with dictionaries, and flirt shamelessly with words and meanings.)
"And while we’re on the subject of research, and because you also asked if you could interview me personally, let me say yes, of course you could, on the following conditions: (1) that you read my work as thoroughly as you can before asking me questions; (2) that you do some prior research on me and my work, to save us the trouble of reviewing my life from the day I was born; and (3) that you bring a tape recorder, so you can quote me precisely, because we live by our words and take great pains to choose the best ones.
"Since you sent me your message by e-mail, I presume that you have some access to the Internet as well. I have a personal website that contains some information about me and my work, and I could put the Web address or URL right here, except that it might be better for you to do a little search on your own on Google or Lycos (if you don’t know what they are, you soon will) and key in ‘Butch Dalisay’ or ‘Jose Dalisay’ as your search term.
"If you find these suggestions and conditions too burdensome for the five- or six-page report you’re expected to write, I’m sure there are other writers you can approach who might be more generous in sharing their own very clear and firm opinions about their work. You could look for these writers – or you could save yourself a trip and look for meaning in the work you already have, written by no other than
"Eagerly and truly yours,
"Butch Dalisay
"PS. My website has a photo of me you can download. I’m grinning in it not because I think I’m so handsome or so smart, but because I want to show that, despite their morbid sensibilities, writers can be a jolly and fairly normal lot, unlike many rock musicians who just have to sulk on their album covers to look interesting or be taken seriously. And then again, don’t take me too seriously, nor think me truly interesting – although I hope you can say that of my stories, which will make writing them worthwhile."
Poet and screenwriter Pete Lacaba sent me a text message to point out – correctly, of course, being the editor and language maven that he also is – that "fictionist" has existed and has been acknowledged in the English language for nearly 200 years, citing a dictionary reference that goes back to the 1820s. I texted Pete back to thank him for his clarification, and to say that, as far as I could tell, "fictionist" has gone out of contemporary American usage in favor of "short story writer" or "novelist," perhaps to give due recognition to the prominence of the novel in Western literature today. (No, I didn’t text all of that.) Besides, there’s something a bit more loose and playful about our current usage of "fictionist", especially in the Latin American sense of ficciones, highly imaginative prose works that defy Western realist conventions.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
It’s all very flattering to actually be read by someone outside my own family and circle of friends, and – like I think I’ve already said here at least once before – I appreciate every new reader, willing or not, and wish him or her a pleasant read. But I simply can’t spend a good part of my working day answering questions about my writings – and I shouldn’t, and I won’t.
When I do find the time to respond to these perplexed and desperate messages (one of which rather charmingly ended with "Hoping for your eager response"), and on behalf of all my writer-friends similarly besieged, I send the student a note like the one below. I’m printing it here as a kind of manifesto, and I keep it in its own file on my hard drive to cut, paste, and post to the next hapless reader of Jose Dalisay’s unhappy fiction, whom we shall call perplexed@homework.com:
"Dear Perplexed,
"Thank you very much for your message, and for taking the time and trouble to read my work. I’m always happy to have another reader, and I’m sorry if your teacher’s assignment has brought you to the brink of despair in trying to understand what I was saying in that piece.
"You asked me what the theme of my story was, what its symbols were, and what they meant. And, while I was at it, could I kindly provide a summary or synopsis of the story, just to make sure that you would get exactly what I had in mind? You also requested a list of my other works, along with a brief résumé and a picture of myself that you could append to your report.
"May I ask you, in turn, to please be patient with this reply, which is not an easy one to make and could, in fact, be longer than a quick and simple answer to your questions.
"I don’t mean to be rude or unhelpful – I’m acutely aware that Filipino writers can scarcely afford to lose the precious few readers they already have by disdaining them or quarreling with them – but I’ll have to beg off from answering most of the questions you raised, for the reasons I’m going to give below.
"As a teacher myself, and as a writer, of course, I’ve always believed that a writer’s job is to write, a student’s job is to read, and a teacher’s job is to help the student turn reading into knowledge. A writer who tries to explain his work usurps the jobs of both student and teacher, and renders them subordinate or even irrelevant to the writer’s own understanding and opinion of his or her work. For who will believe a lowly student, or even a brilliant teacher (or, as often emerges, a brilliant student), whose interpretation of a poem or story differs from that of the writer, once the writer has spoken?
"The writer speaks once and only once, and that is in, through, and with the work itself. In fact, it is not even the writer’s person, which can be very dull and unpleasant, that speaks, but his or her heightened intuition, his or her deep-felt apprehension of the marvelous in the commonplace. Please mark that word: It is an ‘apprehension,’ a sense, a learned suspicion – not a boxed and labeled certainty, which is always, or should be, beyond the writer’s reach.
"This means, dear Perplexed, that if I knew very clearly from the start what I had to say about the world in my story, then I would not have bothered to write the story, but an essay, or something like this that you can digest in one sitting and locate and mark the thesis statement of with a highlighter. I write fiction because I think the story will lead me and my reader to some truth in a roundabout way, and the pleasure has always lain more in the pursuit of it than in the truths themselves (which can be very harsh and depressing). You can’t know what that truth is until you look for it in fiction and by the means of fiction, which, in its own strange way, does that by a bit of very clever lying, by pretending that some things happened when they never really did.
"That brings me to one of your questions, brought up by many others like you: ‘Did it really happen?’ This one I will choose to answer: yes, of course it did – but in the story, on the page, which is the only ‘reality’ that counts for the moment. That’s different from asking ‘Do these things happen in real life?’ or ‘What does this story say about our people and society?’, which are also worth talking about. I suspect, however, that what you want to know is whether the events in my story really happened to me, in my own life. For that I’ll ask you in turn: Beyond its curiosity value, what does it matter if it did or didn’t? Do you have to die to write about death? Do you have to have been imprisoned to write about prison? The fact is that dead people don’t write stories, and there are hundreds of thousands of people languishing in prison every day, with just a very few of them ever becoming writers, and fewer still good writers.
"Does direct experience make a story any better or any richer? Perhaps yes, through more authentic detail. But that’s every writer’s challenge – to evoke the setting and the mood of a certain reality without necessarily having seen it; or, having seen it, to render it vividly, in fine detail, or to embellish and even distort it according to some design. (Oddly enough, the distortion of a subject can define it even more sharply.) Personal experience gives us story ideas, material, and sources, but it’s the writer’s vision and craft – the truly important must-haves – that transform them into living fiction.
"I don’t provide synopses of my work because every synopsis is already a reading, an interpretation, and you should come up with your own. If I wrote something that’s far too vague or simply doesn’t make sense, then say so; it could very well be my fault. Writers can make awful mistakes (my protagonist’s name changed once, right in the middle of a published story), or write some pretty awful passages. That doesn’t absolve you from doing a little research or something so simple as looking up a word in the dictionary. (Here’s one quick tip about how writers become writers: They fall in love with dictionaries, and flirt shamelessly with words and meanings.)
"And while we’re on the subject of research, and because you also asked if you could interview me personally, let me say yes, of course you could, on the following conditions: (1) that you read my work as thoroughly as you can before asking me questions; (2) that you do some prior research on me and my work, to save us the trouble of reviewing my life from the day I was born; and (3) that you bring a tape recorder, so you can quote me precisely, because we live by our words and take great pains to choose the best ones.
"Since you sent me your message by e-mail, I presume that you have some access to the Internet as well. I have a personal website that contains some information about me and my work, and I could put the Web address or URL right here, except that it might be better for you to do a little search on your own on Google or Lycos (if you don’t know what they are, you soon will) and key in ‘Butch Dalisay’ or ‘Jose Dalisay’ as your search term.
"If you find these suggestions and conditions too burdensome for the five- or six-page report you’re expected to write, I’m sure there are other writers you can approach who might be more generous in sharing their own very clear and firm opinions about their work. You could look for these writers – or you could save yourself a trip and look for meaning in the work you already have, written by no other than
"Eagerly and truly yours,
"Butch Dalisay
"PS. My website has a photo of me you can download. I’m grinning in it not because I think I’m so handsome or so smart, but because I want to show that, despite their morbid sensibilities, writers can be a jolly and fairly normal lot, unlike many rock musicians who just have to sulk on their album covers to look interesting or be taken seriously. And then again, don’t take me too seriously, nor think me truly interesting – although I hope you can say that of my stories, which will make writing them worthwhile."
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