How I Write What I Write

"I want to see you write," she said.

"It's a solitary affair; I will bore you just by watching me," I replied.

"It doesn't matter."





I usually begin with a random word, sometimes a calculated phrase, oftentimes just a silly thought teetering between sanity and insanity, until it blossoms into a sentence — a life sentence mostly — because my faulty hands were given both a gift and a curse called prose, which I have to endure daily like a pile of shit trying to force its way out of my ass when the toilet is so damn near. It is a gift, because where I start to push pen on paper, or hack away at a keypad, is also where the magic begins, the kind that gets you baked without having to snort anything illegal — through your nose or elsewhere is completely your call — taking you to heights unimaginable it's almost like you're going places without having to catapult yourself from a trebuchet. The sky's the langit, as they say. Strangely enough, one can also say that writing is its own forbidden substance that has previously sent writers to nowhere other than jail only to be shot from behind if history is to remind us anything, but that's another story best told by Jose Rizal from his grave.

Alas, by the same token, this gift is also its own curse, because where the magic ends is where the nightmares creep in long before I could finish what I write. If it's about something sad — and for the love of crackers I rarely write about happy ones – the temptation to either downgrade everything into prosaic drivel, or leave it to gather dust as a draft left untouched over the course of a year or two, can be overwhelming. It is my escape from my escape, as temporary and unstable as the shifting seasons, for it will reel me back in sooner than later because in my freedom I am never truly free from anything. Or anyone. I have been writing for so many years and yet I still have to get myself fully desensitized from the emotional doom and gloom that I deftly hide, try as I might, under the cloak of fiction, because the longer I stretch the boundaries the more it consumes me, and the more I become one with what I write the more I reveal myself.

Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of writing fiction.





"Are you really sure you want to see me write?"

"Yes."

"Alright then."





Someone from long ago said that I have a distinct way with my words, probably beyond playful, dressing everything with such pageantry despite the ambiguousness, to the point that clarity is not something you will want to demand from me. I thought Baby when I write, vagueness is my cup of tea, and I drink it everyday like a thirsty sonofabitch. And if I can make you wet by virtue of this ambivalence I possess, then allow me to speak in tongues forever. But that was just my imagination. Truth be told, the day I become clear may just as well be the day I stop writing altogether. I confided that, quite on the contrary, words are the ones that have their way with me. And so, how I write what I write depends on whether the words conceived in my mind will make me ballistic, or ecstatic, perhaps depressed, sometimes thoroughly unaffected, some other times fully possessed. If you see me sitting by the corner, staring at the wall while splitting hairs, mumbling gibberish, then you have me at my perfect form, about to give birth to a novel.

Which reminds me. Years back, when I was in the midst of attempting to complete the drudgery of writing a novel – which to this very day remains stillborn, my room back in the province its womb – I remember someone telling me that she feels like she is talking to the dead national hero whenever I reply to her. I thought Very well then, Josephine Bracken, my dear judge jury and executioner, touch me not, this filibuster, but should I turn my back now and wait for the bullets to rip through my heart just so that we can call it a day? I wasn't particularly amused with the comparison, because I knew I was far from the caliber of the guy who used to hide under the names Laong Laan and Dimasalang, he who already published two major novels at my age, while I struggled like a slug crawling uphill to even finish just one draft. That was the last time I talked to her. But I figured maybe she had a point without her being fully aware of it. Maybe I needed to be as seditious, treacherous, and rebellious as I could be so that I can finally understand how to write what I write, even if it meant I had to lay my neck on the line, if not the entire corpus of my existence.





"Splice, on cue: I'm a fan, not a muse."

"You are both."