“Be Boring. Take Advice.”

An undelivered keynote speech to the Iligan National Writers Workshop

Hello friends. Would you like to write better? Here are two things — yes, just two things —that I have learned from a bit of work experience as a writer. I hope this will be easier to memorize and will be of some help (or comfort) to you in your life.

Here we go…

Number 1: Be Boring

Does anybody here know who said or wrote the following line?

“I have to live badly in order to write well.”

It’s a perfect line, don’t you think? The economy of the words, the ironic wit, the sad, been-there-done-that voice. What a beautiful sentence.

But you know what? I refuse to accept the sentence that one has to live badly in order to write well. Or that one has to be poor or marginalized or lonely in order to produce compelling art. I refuse! I refuse to accept that one has to live badly in order to write well. I have to keep saying this to myself, as a mantra, because the image of the beautiful, gaunt-faced intense, struggling young artist, luminous in his suffering, is just way too difficult to resist. Believe me, I have fallen in love with this man too many times, and it’s been hard, because I don’t like becoming gaunt-faced in hunger and thirst, although I know for a fact that gaunt-facedness can really set off the fire in one’s eyes, or the violent waves of an unsettled hairstyle.

So my life thus far has been about finding ways to escape this anonymous philosopher’s sentence to himself and to all the great writers out there.

Forgive me for assuming that you are no different from me and that you too would like a reprieve from this romantic curse. This is a keynote speech, after all, and I would like to start the 18th INWW on a high note.

For this speech, I had to ask myself who I think are the successful writers in my book. And I don’t mean to be patronizing, but I think all of our panelists here belong to that group. For one, they are all from the academe, and they are part of a writing community, and they are supportive of each other, at least most of the time. They say that it takes a village to raise a child. I say the same for a writer. It takes a village of writers to raise a writer. Yes, writers can be a little mean to each other at times, like most humans, you know, but the good intentions are always there. They are here to educate, and to apply their immense powers of intellect and wisdom to the works that made it out here. To me, the life of such a writer, while simple and lacking in the usual fireworks that maybe the life of a celebrity or president of a country or a sister of this president might have, is utterly desirable, if one desires to keep writing and living well at the same time.

But let me go back to that again: living well. What does that mean for us writers?

The best insight into living well in a writerly fashion I got from Charlson Ong, who in turn got it from Manuel Arguilla. Arguilla once told another writer Franz Arcellana, this killer line:

“More life in art, less art in life.”

What does that mean? I understand it to mean this: to write well, live a boring life. A typical day of such a boring life may go like this: wake up, take morning coffee, write, take cigarette break, write, open cup noodle, write after eating cup noodle, take a bath, go to class, go home and so on. Become a creature of habit. I know for a fact that the acclaimed screenwriter Ricky Lee would always write the whole morning, every single day.

There is another reason why being boring is good for us. It saves us the energy we need to breathe life into our characters. Imagine if we had to hustle, womanize, and seduce people all the time in real life. We would have no time and bodily fluids left to create the colorful life inside our heads.

Live a boring life. Have a day job. You can live the grand narrative if you like, get married and have kids, but just remain boring about it. If you are crying and laughing too hard and too often in life, it means you are not living your life in a boring enough fashion. So please be a little more boring if you aren’t already.

But without adultery, there can be no novel, wrote Colette.

Go to hell, Colette! I like you more when you’re just quietly making your buko pies in Tagaytay!

Boring, uneventful life: check.

Now let’s move on to creating the colorful life inside your head and putting it down on paper.

I happen to work in TV now. It’s been a bumpy road going there. It was an on and off affair. Here’s my career track: I attended a network-sponsored writing workshop, then wrote segments for a variety show called S.O.P, and I was doing scripts for plugs and spiels for a music channel at the same time. I was always in love with TV and cinema. With TV, your work instantly has a reader. Your work is never neglected and lonely. I like the idea of my work getting amplified by TV.

Another area where the amplification of a written work happens all the time is at the academe. Your work is your canon, you teach it and it gets passed on to the next batch of students. As in the TV world, you also have a captive audience in the academe. Of course, I would also love to work this field in the future.

For a time, I wrote scripts for a magazine show. But now, I do a different kind of writing: writing with music. It’s actually the same as writing fiction or script, only that I now use notes and sounds instead of words. And the network thinks I’m effective, so they’ve accredited me as their musical scorer and sound designer, which simply means you get to hear my music on the air a whole lot, and if you can slow the tape down to milliseconds, you might actually hear me whispering my favorite motto — I have to not live badly in order to write well!

The people who work for TV are the some of the most creative writers I know. Creative not because they are original and singular in their imagination, but because they are great adaptors and reworkers of themes that have worked in the past. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said (and Allah, I hope this literature website where I got this quote is credible!):

“All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”

Writers for TV repurpose what has always worked for the zeitgeist. And they are relentless in their work. They don’t stop writing. Ever heard of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule? That when you do something for at least 10,000 hours, you’ll become very good at it? Makes a lot of common sense, and that’s how it’s been for TV writers, and for any other creative person striving in any kind of human endeavor for that matter.

Whether you’re a poet, a fictionist, a teacher, a journalist, just keep writing, top Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, and you’ll be fine. Really. Rework, rework, rework. Sorry, but I don’t believe there is a truly singular imagination out there, except for God. I blame Haruki Murakami. I thought Christopher Nolan’s film Inception was the product of Nolan’s singular genius, until I read Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore and realized:

Christopher Nolan is a thief!

Just like me!

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Repeat as mantra: we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Humility is a rewarding virtue, especially when you are friendly and open-minded enough to talk and have some discourse with the giants you are standing on. Mam Chari, Mam Erlinda, Mam Christine, Mam Merlie, Sir Leoncio, Sir Jaime, Sir Tibo, Sir Tony, have time and again exhorted us writers to get to know our myths and traditions better. Our very own myths and traditions are the giants we stand on. The more we know about our myths and traditions, the more powerful our writing will be. Whenever I read a story about, say, a kataw (a tree elemental in Marinduque but may also mean a mermaid in some parts of Visayas), my mind instantly cross-references it with the bits and pieces of folklore that I know. These bits then connect to other bits and pieces from my subconscious until they become a fully-formed world. Only then can I lose myself and wander in the fields of the narrative, to emerge back to reality refreshed and pleased by someone’s talent, and my boring life is never the same again.

That’s another reason why a boring life is ideal for us.

Every good story we read makes it a little less so.

Number 2: Listen to advice

The landscape of TV writing has changed, the prizewinning writer Liza Magtoto told me. As a PETA-trained writer and playwright, she’s always had education as her main goal in writing. She started out writing for educational shows like Hiraya Manawari, Mathinik, Sineskwela and Bayani. This was during the early 90s, before the onslaught of soap operas.

Then when the century turned in 2000, something turned in TV as well. Dang Bagas, a headwriter, shares that soaps started becoming more important. They were rating well and lasting for years. Mara Clara, for one, was on TV for six whole years.

So the important question for me was — did my friend Liza survive the change in the landscape? She wanted so much to write to educate, but the TV world has shifted its priority and has determined the audience wants to see more of those archetypal characters that fight, cry, eat or fuck too much (of course the fucking is always implied. TV is still at the mercy of MTRCB).

The good news is not only has my friend Liza survived: she has flourished! “When I’m not doing projects for TV, I’m doing projects for schools, writing plays for them,” she reports. When something renders something half-obsolete, like what the soaps have done to the educational shows, that something actually enjoys a resurgence. Look at snail mail. When email came, we thought that was the end of postal service. But something good happened to postal service in the end. Can you guess what those three letters are?

Anyway, Liza’s luxury is travel. She travels a lot, but it’s not in some exotic country with unintelligible citizens. She travels the streets of Manila, letting her imagination roam. She does her wild mind exercises in the mornings, writing in ten minutes without lifting her pen from paper. She lives a simple life.

If this is not living well, my friends, then what is?

There will always be a need for writers in any field. Writers who are humble. Writers who do not view their material in a condescending way. Writers who can work well with others. As for writers who are not humble, who are condescending and who don’t work well with others — they will always be around, but believe me, their days are numbered!

Writers who live well write well. Mediocre writers who live well write well with mediocrity. Gifted writers who live well write well giftedly. And so on. (And that’s my other gift, writing my way out of a jam. There are talented writers and not so talented ones. If you fall in either, live with it. I shall refuse to generalize at this point and let you know that just because you live and write well doesn’t mean your work will make it unscathed on air, if at all, or people will start lining up for your autograph. It’s not always the case. Sometimes, you’ll realize you’re probably more effective with a medium other than the written word, like I did.)

But never forget — it’s your writing that brought you here, all expense paid! And that means you’ve got potential — like I once did!

At this point, I would like to read an excerpt from an actual ad for TV writers.

Applicants should have a passion for writing, a sense of drama and basic knowledge of the craft of writing, no condescension towards teleseryes, open to criticism, hardworking and patient. Creative Writing degrees or writing experiences are not required. Writers who have worked for other TV stations or for other media are welcome to apply. Applicants should be willing to work full-time as a teleserye writer; i.e., students and individuals with full-time or part-time are not qualified.

So… do you have what it takes to be a writer? You need to go through the gauntlet and it can be quite daunting at first. But once you break through the cordon, like I have, you get to have an opportunity to amplify your unique voice, your ideas, your talent. You’ll get to meet and work with a whole bunch of boring people. You will write well and live well.

And that’s a sentence I intend to carry out for life.

May we all write — and live — well!