 Hi, I'm José de Lisai Jr., people call me Butch, and I teach English and great of writing here at the University of the Philippines, but at the end of the day I'm really a writer. I write all kinds of things, and I've brought some samples with me here today. I write stories, short stories. I write novels, poems, plays in Filipino, and biographies of famous people. I show these to you because I like to think of myself as a kind of a Swiss army knife of writing. I'm largely self-taught. I began writing for a living in my mid-teens. I began writing television plays when I was 16 and dropped out of school to become a journalist at 18. I'm telling you these things because one of the first things you have to know about writing is that actually you don't have to go to school to write. What do you need to do to become a writer? You need to have a love of language very early on. You need to want to read. You need to know how language works in different ways, and you need to want to do it yourself. I started writing at a very young age because before I was a writer, I was a reader. It just so happened that I was a very poor student in a rich man's school. The only thing I could do was to go to the library to amuse myself. I began reading The Hardy Boys. When I was done with The Hardy Boys, I went on to Nancy Drew. I read all kinds of books, history books, science books, adventure stories. I told myself, I remember at the age of about 10 years old, that when I grew up, there was nothing I wanted to be than to write. I began writing by putting pieces of paper together, stitching their spines, and grabbing a pen to write my own stories. Especially my own version of The Hardy Boys, set in Mandeluyong, where we grew up. And later on, I began writing my own stories. I entered the Philippine Science Science School when I was 12 years old, thinking for a minute that perhaps I could be a scientist too. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. As I often tell people, my grade in English was 1.0. My grade in math was 5.0. And I think that was the long and short of it. I entered UP as an industrial engineering major. And again, my grade in English was 1. My grade in math was 5, and that made a decision for me. I realized that there was nothing I could reasonably do well or actually do better than write. And I've been writing ever since. I dropped out of UP at 17, found a job as a newspaper reporter, and worked as a writer for the next 10 years or so until I decided that writing alone wasn't that satisfying. There's a point in the writer's life where you want to learn more and able to write better. And at that point, I said, let's go back to school. So I went back to UP, finished my degree, and I've been here ever since. Writing and teaching for the past 30 years or so. And as I approach retirement, there's still nothing more I'd like to do than to write and to teach young people like you to become writers like me. A lot of people ask, even within the university itself, if writing can really be taught and learn. And I had to ask them, well, why not? I mean, you have schools for music, you have schools for art, so why shouldn't there be courses for writing? Writing is something that is learned in life. People also ask me if writers are born or a writer's made. But I almost tell them geniuses might be found in other disciplines. For example, like mathematics and music, where you have a Ramanujam or a Mozart who produces a symphony at around age eight. That just doesn't happen in writing because to write, you need to have lived. You need to have had life experiences, both the funny and the tragic. And you need to have stepped back and looked at these experiences and made sense of them and put that sense on paper or on a computer screen. You can't rush writing. Writing makes use of words loaded with emotional and social meaning that makes sense only when you've undergone those same experiences, only when you've felt those same emotions and only when you've acquired the kind of maturity that allows you to understand how these words work not only in society but also within yourself. Of all the things that, the kinds of things that I write, what is it that gives me the most pleasure? And I always say it's fiction. It's the art of making and telling stories. I've written three collections of short fiction, a couple of novels. And again of all the books that I've done, nothing gives me quite the same satisfaction as a good book of stories which might take me anywhere from about five to seven years to put together. But those five and seven years of writing really look back on and draw upon at least thirty years or twenty years of experience. Why fiction? Of all the possible literary genres that anybody can choose. Fiction is essentially, shall we say, the art of lying. But this is lying with a high purpose. This is lying to get to the truth of things, to the truth of human life. Why do we need to lie? Why not just do what journalists do and go straight for the facts? Why do we have to make believe that things happen to make people understand the truth of human life? I'll give you one of the many wonderful definitions of art that I've come across in my own reading. And I think this came from another UP professor and a poet, Ricardo Demetilio, who once said that art is the mirror of Perseus. Now you remember Perseus from the Greek myth of the Medusa, the Gorgons, these women with a really bad hair day. And Perseus was the hero who went out to slay them. A problem of course was that you couldn't kill Medusa just by lunging at her with a sword because one look from Medusa would turn you to stone. How did Perseus, our hero, solve this problem? You remember from the myth that Perseus had a shield, a burnished shield, a brilliant shield that he used as a mirror and he looked into that shield to find out where Medusa was and used it to guide his sword to kill Medusa. Now let's get back to our definition of art. Art is the mirror of Perseus. Why do we need a mirror to confront reality, to confront everyday life? Because reality can often be too difficult to look at face to face like Medusa herself. Confronting reality on its own terms will sometimes paralyze us and fiction on the other hand allows us a means by which to deal with reality without having to surrender to its most terrifying aspects. We can handle reality if we look at it through a mirror from the side and that's what fiction does. By making believe, by playing a game of pretense like this happened to somebody else although that somebody else may sound a lot like you and your life, by reading stories like that we are able to deal with what we might otherwise resist or even worse be in a sense killed by. Fiction gives us a handle on real life in a way that makes and you'll see this in tragedy. You'll see this in the saddest stories, the saddest novels that you've read. You'll see that in fiction even the worst things in life not only become bearable but in some very very strange way pleasurable. We find relief in reading the most terrible things about human life and about ourselves because it's happening to somebody else and we can relate and we can sympathize and we can cry with that person and that's the magic of fiction. It makes us weep but within us it makes us laugh at the same time. That aesthetic pleasure that we derive from fiction is what the Greeks call the catharsis. It's a purgation. It's a cleansing of the soul again thinking that the worst things happen to other people although they could very well happen to us. There's one more thing about fiction that I'd like to take up with you and this is one of my favorite quotes from the writer Mark Twain who said and I'm paraphrasing Twain here. He said, of course fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction after all has to make sense. What does this mean? When I teach writing the short story for example in my classes very often I'll find students who send me drafts of stories whose plots seem to be not quite believable. I mean things happen to people seemingly without a reason and of course in real life they do. And when I ask my students why did this thing happen in your story they'll tell me, yes sir, it happened to me, of course it happened to me. And this is where I bring out Mark Twain's quotation. Fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction after all has to make sense. What happens to us in real life quite often doesn't make sense. Incredible things happen to us without a reason. Fiction doesn't work that way. Fiction tries to bring meaning to human experience. Fiction puts all these things together and tries to find the thread of sense in them. Fiction believes that there is a logic to human life and it is the writer's job to find that thread of logic that yields meaning. And so in fiction, remember this, it really happened is not an excuse. It really happened is just the beginning, the possible beginning of good fiction. In fact in fiction nothing needs to have happened in real life. The important thing in fiction is that it's happening on the page and it's believable. And that's the hallmark of a great work of fiction, that it can move you, that it can make you think that oh my goodness how could this have happened to so and so. You know in fiction, in great fiction, when authors like José Rizal create characters like Christos de Mibara or Maria Clara, they seem even more real. I mean Maria Clara, Dona Victorina, these characters from the nollie and the fili, they seem even more real than many of our true historical personages because Rizal as a very skillful writer has made us believe that these people really live, even if we know that they didn't. But they live on the page and they live forever. People also ask me, where do story ideas come from? How do you start a story? Do you start with a theme? Do you draw on your own life? Let me take the first question first. Do you start with a theme, a big theme like let's say justice, freedom, save the environment, and noble ideas that occur of course to all of us? And you might be surprised but I advise my students that theme is probably the worst place to start in fiction. And you know why? Because writing with a theme in mind like the kind of theme that you used to write for freshman English, remember those five paragraphs where you had to prove a point? Fiction doesn't work that way. Let me step backwards a bit and for example, I'll put on my other hat as a writer of essays. I used to write editorials for a newspaper and four or five times a week I would have to write a fairly long essay about lofty subjects like national sovereignty, social justice, rising criminality and the kinds of things that you would find on the opinion page. Writing essays as opposed to writing fiction are two very different things. When I write an essay, a formal essay like an editorial, I will deal largely in abstractions. I will use indeed words like justice and freedom. In a good story, you hardly ever find words like that because fiction works with concrete objects with very, very specific situations whereas essays deal in generalizations, in abstractions. The whole point of writing fiction, let's say even a story that deals with justice with the same topic as an essay or an editorial might, a story that deals with justice will prove the need for justice, again, employing human characters engaged in a very human conflict. In other words, you need drama. You need people in trouble in a situation that shows them in a very tight spot to reveal the kinds of positions and the kinds of considerations that would lead the characters to demand justice. So the point of the story will still be we need justice, however, you need to point that out without ever, ever using that word. So in other words, fiction in a sense is the art of saying the unsayable. And you can do that by employing, again, human characters in very compelling situations that move the emotions and move the mind to come to its own conclusions. The reader has to be part of the process of understanding, unlike the essay which yields its meaning, which raises its point. Several times, very often in the last paragraph, a good story will not give you that kind of very clear conclusion. Many of the best stories will leave you with a big question mark in your head. What happened here? And that's a mystery for you, the reader, to figure out. And when you've done that figuring out, you, the reader, will feel tremendously happy because you have been rewarded with the meaning of the story. This is the kind of aesthetic pleasure that the reader gets from reading good fiction. You make sense of life yourself. You come to your own conclusions using your own experience, your own intelligence, your own discernment. Nobody will tell you what life means but you. And that is the pleasure of reading the story. I'll give you a concrete example of how I write typically my stories. Again I don't begin with a theme. Again don't worry, the theme will emerge. Every story will have its theme. But actually that will be for somebody else to point out, not use the author. Instead of themes, what I begin with is actually a theme, an object, or maybe even a place. As a writer, I would typically put myself in a rather normal situation. Let us say, oh this is something I often tell my students. You know, you don't need to go to a galaxy far, far away for story material. All you need to do is say to go to a hamburger joint in a place like Kubao, the kind of place where a lot of ordinary people will be passing through. You sit in a corner table and you look around and you ask yourself, where is the story here? Where is the drama? What is that woman saying to her mother? What is that couple arguing about? How do you turn what seems to be an ordinary situation into something truly different, something possibly even marvelous? I always ask my students, bring me somewhere I've never been before. That's the challenge the writer faces at the beginning of writing the story. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to have been given a fellowship in Scotland, in Edinburgh. And while there, some of you might know that my hobby is collecting vintage fountain pens. So I went around and found a shop full of fountain pens. And I went up to this woman and asked her, would you happen to have a 1930s Parker vacuumatic oversize in burgundy red? And she said, well, sir, as a matter of fact, we do. And I nearly gasped for breath because this was my holy grail. And I said, how much? And she said, 150 pounds. That was like a one month salary at that time as an assistant professor at UP. But knowing that I would never see that pen again, I gave her my credit card and went back to my writing place, a shivering with both delight and remorse. I said, oh my God, what did I just do? How would I explain this to my wife? And so I actually brought that pen here, right here. And so I went back to my cubicle and said, OK, you better write a story about a pen. And so I put that pen in front of me and began writing a story about a pen. About a fellow who owned a pen when it was no longer fashionable, and this poor fellow whom I modeled after someone I knew found himself having to write a love letter for a blind woman that he had a terrific crush on. And the love letter, of course, was for somebody else. That story became penmanship. And here's the book and the pen. And guess what, the story won first prize in a writing competition. And I got back the cost of my pen. That's just a little story about how stories get written. You don't think of big things. You just write about what am I going to do with this material right in front of me? How will I make a story out of a coffee cup, a bottle of soft drink? How can this possibly be dramatic? How can this bring people into trouble? And how will they wriggle out of that situation? That's what fascinates me about writing stories. You'll never know when and how they'll happen, which leads me again to another approach that I use in writing stories. Now there is no single way of writing stories. Every writer will have his or her own methodology. For myself, I like to write stories without really knowing what they will be about or where they will lead to. You can think of this as the Bahalana method. And it works this way. Like I said, I might find an object, start there, find a character, add another character, give them a problem, and let's see where that goes. Again, you see the option is to start with a very well-defined plot. And by plot, we mean the story of the story. It's technically speaking a causal sequence of events that moves the narrative forward and leads to a resolution in the very end of the story. If you think very logically, you can do that. A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, and so on. However, I find that when I do that, if I know in advance where the story will lead, then there's no longer any suspense for me. And if there's no suspense for me, then there's no pleasure in constructing the narrative. It's just like building a house with an architect's plans, which is actually a good idea if you're building a house. But writing fiction isn't quite like that. When you begin writing fiction, you don't know if this is going to be a bungalow, or if this is going to be a 10-story building. You just never know. I think, and of course, you can only develop this over time, you need to go by your instinct. You need to get to a point, you yourself as an author have never been before. When the characters you create start to assume and to acquire their own lives and to make their own decisions, when they push the story for you, instead of you pushing them forward, then you're really in that zone. And typically this might happen around three in the morning where you're all tingly, and I think every artist in every medium reaches this point. You're tingly because you don't know what you've just created. And it both terrifies you and at the same time you feel absolutely exultant. You are in the presence of something that was never there before. And in this case, it's a terrific story that you have brought into the world. I say that it's really better to trust your instincts than to work based on a strictly plotted storyline because as one of my, I didn't bring it today, but as one of my books says in its title, the knowing is in the writing. What do I mean by that? When you begin a story, you think you know your characters. You might even take notes down and say, oh, Tony is a 28-year-old lawyer who's thinking of migrating to the states, but is also engaged to be married to so and so. In other words, you begin by jotting down these notes about characters based on people, you know, maybe based on yourself. You think you know them, but the fact is you don't. You don't know your characters. You don't know what they'll do until you put them in this pressure cooker that you've created around them, a pressure cooker that is really the conflict, the situation that you put them into so that they reveal their inner selves. The whole point of fiction, and this is important to remember, the whole point of fiction and even of the plot itself is character revelation. What do I mean by that? It means revealing our innermost selves, the truth about ourselves, the truth about our lives, and that truth will only emerge if we find ourselves under extreme pressure. On most days, we are under no such pressure. We just act our normal selves. We pretend to be happy. We pretend to be complete. For me, I actually think we are happy and complete until a problem suddenly appears. Our happiness is suddenly at stake and that's when we respond. That's when we start stepping out of our everyday selves to show something in us that sometimes even we ourselves don't realize was always there. Is it possible, for example, for a mother to kill her child? If you're a mother or a parent, of course you will say that will never happen to me. I will never do that. You know there's a terrific story where a mother is forced to kill her own daughter, a daughter whom she loves. Why? Because this is a wartime story. They are being hunted down. They're hiding from the enemy and the baby suddenly starts crying. If the mother lets her child cry as she normally would, that whole community of people will be at risk. So whether she do, she puts her own hand around her daughter's mouth until the daughter struggles no more. That's fiction. At the same time, we know that that's also real life. It will very likely have happened many, many times in many, many wars. But that's to show you that there is always something in us that an extreme situation will bring out that we never ever thought possible. And this is the writer's task, to look as deep into you, into the character as he or she possibly can, and to bring out that innermost part of you, that darkest secret in you. To bring that into broad daylight so that you can confront yourself and you can understand what it is that makes you, that makes all of us truly and perhaps tragically human. When I'm dealing with young or new writers of fiction, I know that I can expect them to write reasonably good stories, probably based on their own lives. But that's not a problem as long as we deal with stories not as biographies, but as fabrications. In other words, as things made up. And many of those stories will be passively good. However, when you want to push yourself to the limit, when you want to do something beyond your present capabilities, what do you do? One of my mantras, one of the things I keep telling my students in class is that when you write stories, when you want to write better stories, the thing for you to do is to raise the stakes. And what does that mean? I mean making things more difficult for yourself and maybe even for your own, for your reader. And that means complicating things further. This doesn't necessarily mean a more complicated plot. It doesn't mean a longer story. But it means making things more difficult for your characters to decide upon. Giving them the tighter situations, heavier problems, not giving them the easy way out. As one of the hallmarks of bad fiction, and I'm sure all of us have seen examples of this, is when the author, like if you're reading a 200 page novel and you're on page 197 and you find that the hero is still being pursued by the villain and there seems to be no solution in sight, you know what's going to happen. On page 198, as the villain chases the hero and they cross the street, you see a big truck coming at the two of them and the hero jumps out of the picture and the truck smashes into the villain. End of story. That is the easy way out. The technical term for that is Deus ex machina or the God out of the machine, which actually goes all the way back to Greek drama. But the thing to keep in mind is that as a writer of fiction, as a writer of good fiction, you cannot take easy options. You cannot give your characters easy solutions. When I'm in a writing situation and I'm thinking what should the character do next or what will the characters say at this point? And something comes to mind. When you're in situations like that, very often the obvious answer, the easy answer is very likely not the best one. Mistrust the easy option because that is probably what 90% of other writers out there will also be thinking. That is what your reader will be thinking. And when your reader can predict your story several pages ahead of you, then you're in trouble. So keep things lively, keep things fresh, keep things unpredictable. Of course what will happen, and it's happened to me many, many times, is that you will find yourself at a dead end. You will find yourself with a whole bunch of unfinished stories. In this computer in front of me, I have a special folder optimistically titled ongoing. And this is where I put all the unfinished stories that I've been working on all the way back since I think my earliest entry here is 1991. I still have computer files going back that far of dead end stories. But the good news is that in fiction writing, nothing is ever wasted. All of those scenes, all of those wonderful lines of dialogue that went nowhere. You can keep them and I keep them as a kind of junkyard, think of an automotive junkyard where you can later on go back and scavenge for parts. You can cannibalize these half stories for scenes, for characters, for alliance that you can use for your present project. And I've done a lot of that. And sometimes miraculously, after not looking at a half finished story for five years, I go back to it and suddenly Eureka, I can see the way out. I can see the way forward. So what I'm telling you is, again, in fiction, drafts are necessary, revision is absolutely necessary. And nothing is ever wasted, not even that precious draft which you thought could have been the best story of all time. That will come into its own fruition, maybe a few months, a few years down the road. But if not the story itself, if not the fragment itself, then the experience of writing it will not be wasted because you will learn from that the next time you write another story. Writing is probably the loneliest profession in the world because literally at the end of the day, there's nobody there but you. To do the writing, to push the writing forward, you'll find yourself again at maybe two or three in the morning with nothing but a cup of coffee to keep you awake. And you're looking at that blank page or these days, of course, at that blinking cursor asking for the next word. Writing can be tremendously lonely. It can also be, because of its loneliness, tremendously self-obsessive. In other words, sometimes you think there's nobody else on earth but you. And therefore, there's no one more important in the whole writing process than you. And of course, to some extent, that's true. You are, after all, you should be your first reader. You are your first audience. If you cannot please yourself, honestly, with what you've written, you cannot expect to please others. But let's remember, and this is very important for every writer to consider. Writing is not just about you. Writing also involves and inevitably engages other people. The other party in this process is the reader, the reader beyond you, the massive people out there who will pick up your work, who will pay good money, perhaps, to read it and to make their own judgments of it. It's very often asked of writers, when you write stories, who is the reader that you have in mind? Of course, aside from yourself, must you have a reader in mind? What kind of reader will that person be? And my answer to that is this. I think that your ideal reader should be someone who is at least as smart as you think you are. And why do I say that? It's because there's always the temptation, when you write stories, to write down, to think that your reader isn't quite as smart as you, and that your reader will never get it without a little extra help from you. So this is what happens with bad stories. You write a draft of, say, nine, ten pages. By the time you get a page nine, and you've worked on the story for so many weeks, you expended so much time and energy on it, and when you get to the end of the story, you start thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so clever in the story, but my poor reader might not get it. So what do you do? You spill the beans. You spend the last paragraph explaining just what you did in the past nine pages. And that's what in the old days was called an epiphany, a terminal explanation of the sense or the meaning of the story. And in some ways, that's okay. People might appreciate that, but it really cheats your intelligent reader of the pleasure of coming to his or her own conclusion. In other words, you have to think of the reader out there as someone who can understand what you've put together, who can have the capability of seeing what you saw and experiencing what you experienced in the same way that you have told it in the story. The important thing is trust. Trust the reader to get what you've written. As long as you've written the story with adequate skill and with enough sensibility and intelligence, your reader will get it. And finding that reader, even if it's only one out of a hundred possible readers, finding that reader will be your ultimate reward as an author. I'll add a couple more points here as far as audiences are concerned. Chief Filipinos, unfortunately, are by and large not a book-buying, book-reading community. Compared for example to the Indians and the Japanese, these are societies where you find people reading books on the bus, on the train, and there are many reasons for that. Of course, chiefly among them, it's the fact that books cost a lot of money in this country and people have understandably other priorities. And so for an author like me, even with these many books, if I come out with a new novel tomorrow, I'll probably be published, I'll have a publication, a print run of about 3,000 copies at most. New authors will be lucky to get 1,000 copies. In a country of over 100 million people, that's in a sense, that's criminal. And that's very sad that we do not have the kind of reading public that we think we deserve. But at the same time, I'm also always surprised that every year, literally hundreds of new books are published by Filipino authors. And that's a good sign that we've kept the faith. It's a sign that this in it expressiveness in the Filipino is alive and well. Our desire to tell stories, our desire to impart the experience of our generation to succeeding ones remains alive and well. Writing is almost, in that sense, a missionary task. It's the task of, really, of heritage. It's the task of preserving and perpetuating and developing what has been important to us as a people for centuries. And few things do that better than writing. Writing stories, writing novels. In keeping alive novels and stories that keep alive the imagination of our people. The creative spirit of our people that not just other generations of Filipinos will benefit from but the world at large. The world can and should discover the best of the Filipino imagination through these books, through these stories, through the products of your mind, your experience that you can put into words on a page, on a screen, in a book.