This story originally appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on October 8, 2002.
After two months in my first job, I knew I was a writer. It has been the longest time I have had the feeling that’s what I want to be.
I wrote my first story when I was eight years old. It was about a prince rescuing a princess from a dragon. It was a story that had often been told, I know, but I managed to make it my own.
One day I was sitting in class, looking like I was paying attention to a lesson in multiplication. My teacher and my classmates never knew I was in a dark forest so old that the trees had turned into charcoal, frozen by the wind. The sun, moon and stars never shone through the storm clouds that wrapped the sky. The only light came from the dragon’s flames that erupted from the solitary tower rising above the forest. That was where the princess was being held captive and where the prince must go to rescue her.
That was the only story I wrote during my childhood, and I lost the pad paper where I had written it during recess.
In college, I took up public administration because I wanted to help people (and I still do). Every day we talked about poverty, corruption and how to make things better. Aside from newspapers and books about taxation, economics and policy formulation, I read Anne Rice, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman. I enjoyed their books because I was still the little boy who liked to be scared and kept the lights on when he slept.
In my junior year, one of my teachers gave me “Eva Luna” by Isabel Allende. Eva Luna was a writer and she lived in a country that was mired in poverty and corruption, with seemingly no hope that things would get better. She was an orphan and she was alone, but with stories she could look at life and take it apart and build it again to whatever she pleased. Sometimes the results were fantastic but always her story seemed familiar and real.
I read the book during one of the most dreary periods of my life. It was October, and it was raining every day. The roof leaked over my bed. I drank almost every night. I had no direction in life and felt I had no future.
It was around that time that I wrote my second story. I wrote more than 4,000 words in one sitting. The scribbles on my notebook were barely intelligible, but I knew every word.
Raul Barrios, on his wedding night, carried his bride Monica in his arms into their house, turned off the lights, and went up the stairs. He dropped her and she fell down the entire flight, crashing her head against each of the 10 steps. Raul had slipped on the rag he had used to wax the upper floor the day before. He too got hurt in the fall, almost breaking his back. After lying on the floor for several minutes, he realized that the house was silent and his wife was gone. She would be gone for 10 years.
That was the first paragraph. That was how I heard it in my head, but it was not the way it came out on paper. My first attempt sounded like I wasn’t interested in the story I was telling. I used the same basic subject-predicate sentence over and over. I was eight again, and only beginning to learn English. It took more than a month of rearranging phrases, looking for synonyms, reading out aloud and staring at words on a computer monitor before I printed out the story.
To this day, I sometimes take out the brown envelope where I hide it and read it again. I know Raul and Monica like they are my neighbors and I have a secret videotape of their lives. Once I even felt like I was living Raul’s life. I was with the girl of my dreams and I dropped her down the stairs.
When I graduated, I still had no direction and nothing to look forward to. Every day I woke up, turned on my computer and pressed buttons until I had several short stories and an unfinished novel and screenplay.
My father started telling me to look for a job. Every Sunday I bought a newspaper and scanned the classified ads. Employers were looking for nurses, engineers, call-center associates and marketing assistants. I still wanted to help people. I applied for government work but even with my degree in public administration and a high civil service exam score, I was not accepted. Months later, I settled for the job I have now.
It’s not so bad. Sometimes I get to write letters, reports and presentations. It’s not as much fun as writing a story but it’s almost the same thing. I look at the things I know, listen to the voice in my head, write down what its says, organize, edit and make it more interesting. But usually, I just answer the phone and type.
I go home every day feeling as if my bones have turned to rubber and my lungs have withered. Standing up in the MRT, packed with hundreds of strangers, I look at the blur of gray buildings, the black smoke of buses, and the pale white of the stars.
One Saturday I woke up knowing I was a writer all along and it could not be helped. I smiled wryly at my predicament.
Among all the classified ads I have read, only a handful ask for writers. And always they specify someone with a degree in English, Mass Communications or Journalism.
I laugh and shake my head. You can teach English, you can teach Mass Communications, you can teach Journalism and even writing, but you can’t teach someone to be a writer. Only a select unfortunate few actually enjoy observing the world and thinking about the words, phrases and sentences that describe precisely what they see. They still remember the lessons on infinitives, dangling participles and when to use the em dash. They can take an ordinary occurrence like falling in love and make it seem new, like no one else had the secret, except the characters, the writer and the reader. Thus, writing a report, an ad campaign or editing somebody else’s work becomes an everyday task.
I envy trained writers. Most of them have discipline, whereas I only write when I feel like writing. Sometimes it is the whole day, every day, and sometimes nothing for months. Trained writers also have the courage to show their work to others and the fortitude to withstand criticism and failure. But what I envy most is their having each other’s company. Their essays, stories and poems don’t remain immaculately white sheets of paper; they become dog-eared, folded, crumpled from so many readings.
Writing that is unread is nothing more than a personal record of thoughts. Writers in Third World countries are the most lonesome in an already lonesome vocation. Reading is considered a chore for school or work and books are a luxury. The cost of an average novel can feed a family for a day. The lucky few mostly read foreign books because they watched “Jurassic Park” or “The Sum of All Fears.” Even famous Filipino writers like Nick Joaquin and Lualhati Bautista only have a limited following in their own country.
I am a writer and my predicament is depressing and driving me mad. I write because I have to. I don’t write to be read. But sometimes I give in to the temptation and force one of my friends to read my stories. I watch them. Sometimes they shake their heads, chuckle and tell me, “This is good.”
