Language Lessons

Recently, a task was given to me as a prerequisite in getting employed as a freelance writer for a not-too-small publishing house. The task at hand was to write three chapters of what to be a novel in the long run. The project was a romance pulp fiction – the kind stereotypically known as the pocketbook maids and helpers read. Not that there is something wrong with it except that the language that I would employ is Pilipino.

For a stubborn writer like me who sticks with the strength of a benny addict to the English language as his preferred vehicle of expression, this was an alien, almost unimaginable, task that I would venture in. I never in my whole writing career wrote in Pilipino. Nor I have secretly dreamt of getting a career in writing in Pilipino. But I needed the extra money so I thought why not give it a try.

Gauging by the writing style expected of the job, I estimated that I could easily whip up, not just three chapters, but the whole novel in a week. That was how confidence I was regarding the matter.

Another underlying purpose as to why I wanted to try my hands in the project was to loosen up my stiff tongue in telling a story. With the casual, formulatic style needed to accomplish the work, I deemed it a good venue to practice making my writing stamina stronger.

But unknown to me, there were lessons, valuable lessons, that I would learn while carried out the task.

First, I was able to connect with the Pilipino language, as if finally finding my true self, my own language, my own voice. Writing in Pilipino is so natural for me it seems I was just merely chatting with a neighbor, telling him a story about matters of the heart.

I have been writing for more than a decade in English and never did I automatically, on the first try, felt at ease with the language the same way I experienced writing in Pilipino. God knows what a backbreaking labor I had undergone just to acquire this relative proficiency in the English language.

I can still recall those desperate, almost hopeless, days when I would scout a corner in our old house to set up a table with my papers and pen and get on toiling for long hours trying to write a decent, simple sentence in English. Those days were difficult and hard – I usually ended up mentally exhausted and sleepy.

This lesson was followed up with a clearer perspective regarding both languages and the inherent tendency of Filipino writers when he uses either of the two.

Probably this tendency is best summed up by the late Rolando Tinio when he described his relationship with the two languages. It went something like this: “When I write in English, I tend to be flowery. But when I write in Pilipino, I write simple and true.”

The late writer could not say it better than that.

When I scanned my electronic copy of some parts of the short fictions that were recently published by a new literary magazine and I could not help but notice the glaring similarity on how those featured writers used the English language in telling their stories.

They all used big, heavy words and their sentences are almost a forest of flowery sentences that can only reek of hyterical artificiality. If by any chance these fictions will be read by natural-born speakers of the language, I don’t blame them if they all throw-up because of the stories’ excessive wordiness.

With these new insights, I appreciate once again my native tongue and at the same time looking at the English language as no different animal altogether.

Barely Writing

I barely write nowadays. Anything you can see in this blog that is posted for the last several months are only the product of my fervent desire to stay in shape. And all of them I wrote during those moments of desperation when I was in need of something to say just to avoid drowning in the state of inability to think. Thus they tend to be gibberish than saying something meaningful at all.

I can only attribute this sparse writing output on my deficiency to continuously read. I say my writing output is proportionate on how voraciously I read. The more I read, the tendency is that I can write more. But lately, I barely read at all.

There is even not one book that I totally consumed this past year (oh, okay, there’s Stainless Longganisa, but it’s really not to be counted at all). Right now, there is a slew of books that is begging for my attention and waiting to be read in its entirety: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which I dream of pulling out of it a novel someday; Jerry Oppenheimer’s Front Row, about the story of Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, and which was the prize I received from Read Magazine for contributing an essay; Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees; and Nick Joaquin’s Culture and History and The Woman Who Had Two Navels – the latter a re-reading after more than a decade of having read it during my college days.

With only this short list of books waiting for me to be read, I cannot help but realize how far I have gone sterile in stimulating my mind. And I cannot be surprised at all if I find myself not writing lately. What even gets my goad over my obvious wanton laziness is to read in another blogger’s site a long list of books he had read which I ever imagined I could read in a year; and it explains why his high writing output and adept use of the English language.

We can say then that reading is like fuel to cars which is writing. If one stops reading, it is inevitable that one cannot continually write. One will agonize on finding that he seems not to know how to write. And I’m experiencing it now.