The Responsibility of a Writer
Whoever said that a writer is the biggest liar but is the reflection of his time, must have spoken truth more than he intended to. It cannot be helped; it is a necessary evil, not exclusive to literature but in all of art, to lie, to make events more dramatic--- to create life and make it larger than life. The method of premeditated confabulation, for lack of fancier term, is a writer’s weapon of choice, his sole lifeline, his only tool to further his art; and the better the artist lies: how he fashions reality according to his own perceptions--- the better his creations will be.
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Plato often shuns himself from reading or watching the dramas of his time( although his famous dialogues read more like screenplays) saying they were poisons for the mind. If Plato were alive today, he would run for the mountains and live in a cave, now with all the unrelenting bombardment of mindless telenovelas and badly written scripts. I wonder if he could last an hour watching Marimar or Lupin.
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Personally, as I have posted before, being a writer is the loneliest profession a soul can have, and the most painful--- more so for a Filipino writer. In this country where people don’t care much about literature, where majority of the reading population either buy textbooks or tabloids, and where writing a novel is a death sentence, it is hard for someone as lazy as me to ask of a writer to stay true to his responsibility. What is a writer’s responsibility, one might ask. I say, the responsibility to lie.
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Or more precisely, to lie better. Better than the one before you. Better than the previous generations of Sionil Joses, Poes, Hemingways, Dimalantas, Villas, Rowlings and Kings. A writer’s responsibility is to improve on his predecessors’ works, not to imitate another one’s genius, like what’s happening to the Philippine cinema lately with all the Asian horror copycats or 70’s loveteams inertia. Never fear to experiment, be it prose or poetry, or else you risk turning yourself into one of those formulaic writers of local comedy. Of course, for starting writers, it would be natural to make your influences shine through your work, like a compass, but only for a time. Eventually evolution will take place, and that’s the time your lies become truths.
******
Why am I saying these? Because it is my sole wish to see a great Filipino writer in this generation or the next to come. It is my foolish dream to see a Filipino writer finally take that elusive podium in Stockholm. When that time comes, I’ll finally realize that a Filipino’s soul is not without hope.
******
Plato often shuns himself from reading or watching the dramas of his time( although his famous dialogues read more like screenplays) saying they were poisons for the mind. If Plato were alive today, he would run for the mountains and live in a cave, now with all the unrelenting bombardment of mindless telenovelas and badly written scripts. I wonder if he could last an hour watching Marimar or Lupin.
******
Personally, as I have posted before, being a writer is the loneliest profession a soul can have, and the most painful--- more so for a Filipino writer. In this country where people don’t care much about literature, where majority of the reading population either buy textbooks or tabloids, and where writing a novel is a death sentence, it is hard for someone as lazy as me to ask of a writer to stay true to his responsibility. What is a writer’s responsibility, one might ask. I say, the responsibility to lie.
******
Or more precisely, to lie better. Better than the one before you. Better than the previous generations of Sionil Joses, Poes, Hemingways, Dimalantas, Villas, Rowlings and Kings. A writer’s responsibility is to improve on his predecessors’ works, not to imitate another one’s genius, like what’s happening to the Philippine cinema lately with all the Asian horror copycats or 70’s loveteams inertia. Never fear to experiment, be it prose or poetry, or else you risk turning yourself into one of those formulaic writers of local comedy. Of course, for starting writers, it would be natural to make your influences shine through your work, like a compass, but only for a time. Eventually evolution will take place, and that’s the time your lies become truths.
******
Why am I saying these? Because it is my sole wish to see a great Filipino writer in this generation or the next to come. It is my foolish dream to see a Filipino writer finally take that elusive podium in Stockholm. When that time comes, I’ll finally realize that a Filipino’s soul is not without hope.
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