Hi Jom,

Sorry if I wasn’t able to acknowledge your text about writing. Run out of load for outside-the-country SMS. Anyhow, it is great to know you are reading all those writers you mentioned like Gunter Grass and William Burroughs. Actually, the evolution of fiction has always caught my fancy; how forms have changed in so many ways. I haven’t read Tin Man nor Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ poetry and musings---some of those, I have laid my eyes on. I have his slim book on cats (he likes feline creatures and is creatively gay). I guess, I have to comb the book shelf because somewhere in one of the anthologies, Grass’ short story was featured.

I began writing a few pages of fiction which I think would take a year to tame. I read that a short story has only one action-hence, brief. An occurrence pasted so fast that you have to watch out for that lone smudge curling in paragraphs and give it a clued-up recognition---wipe it with a clean hankie of sort. No complications of too many cramped talks; of shifting settings. Yet, I also read that curious story about a brimstone house by Renata Adler. It happened in one abode with smidgens of actions and non-actions happening elsewhere. That house could uncover stories of a generation. Why not make a short story spanning an entire lifetime by using that technique? Minimal paragraphs not of an event but of several serialized episodes.

After all, what does life consist of really? Major impacts to human psyche do not happen in one snowball. They comprise scraps of the mundane- those snubbed domesticities frowned upon by “big” thinkers as inadequate for explorations. A source of conflict that an author utilizes to the hilt-to hold, to be in awe of, to suspend the crumbling pieces from dropping---is debatable. A story’s climax may come not from two wounded people so wretchedly torn but from a description of a table whose leg had been erroneously chopped off by an electrician. What am I saying? Peaks shoot off from everywhere, fiction included.

Don’t we do that mostly? We breathe, eat, go to school, work, earn, leave a place. We fart a lot of times. 9/10th of life unmiraculously constitute these things. A portion of humanity might have founded empires and re-creations about their glories might have influenced narrative genres from fantasy to folk tale. Yet, most of the pivotal physical actions take place in our minds and bowel movements unless we do carpentry or sent to battlefields to preserve civilization. In between we may have fallen in love, fled away from relationships, ruined our people relations, became hermits. We even threw the stale coffee from last night’s monstrous indolence of sitting down. Under a pen, these ordinary spurts could lead to some provocative actions, something out of the blue like slaying the dragons.

Short story, I think, is not a diminishing and narrowed form of just one action. Its true bent is on the economy of words as you present your tale. It is an expandable writing amulet in terms of setting. A writer should not brush off “action sidelines” just like that because they happened outside an event. Stories do stick there when compiled as a lifetime consequence.

Remember that little book I lent you-the O. Henry anthology? Nuzzled there are some of the words I want my characters to hug and spit on at the same time. In one swooshing lifetime. Not in thousand pages but twenty. I don’t know. One toys with the idea of breaking out from the mold even if one is ignorant of the molds and literary traditions and other terrifying walls like that. As a start, the thought alone is daunting.

Anyway, I have not realized how difficult it is to invent. Really. Play god to a situation of your imagination. You have to provide the plants and clouds and streets when you merely want one character to yell or else he is going to be marooned in a jungle somewhere in Guatemala. Somehow, you want to rebuff reality, allow your invented yet tormented people to chirrup like parakeets and say nothing. Wouldn’t that be too indulgent? What reader would want that? I am the kind of reader who would want that.

I also ponder : Isn’t that the purpose of fiction ----to provide an exciting suspension of a possibility? That something that could not happen, happens without constraint? That Hansel and Gretel will really be swallowed by that nasty machine especially constructed as a pastry processor? Inside a house made of candies and cookies no less! My subconscious is always aware of that whenever I observe the interiors of a bakery. Among those ensaymadas lined up in baking tins are the historically fictive ragamuffins : flattened Hansel and Gretel. Can you imagine them, these innocent children of pug noses and tattered clothes (see, I am embellishing but that’s how a fable gets to me--- unnecessarily victimized, they become rigidly adult under my rather sympathetic eyes) cut down to pieces courtesy of that finicky witch-cannibal who could not even eat the grubby kids wholly but had to, pray tell, bake them? They need to be filled with strawberry syrups and M&Ms. How cultured! There is your forerunner to Hannibal Lechter.

So, I do not care whether that witch is all about isolation or is in deep denial of her roof dripping with chocolates and thus says something about excessive capitalism ----but that is fiction. I am made alive not by the extracurricular and explorative meanings but by the weaving of that incredible, make-believe story. Since when was I aware that there should be limits to it? Not in my own existence. Hard work comes by making it so engaging, or the words must really be formed nicely to merit long periods of glances. If someone looks for universal truth to that, redirect him to the Bible instead. Let the readers apportion your creation to their own loves and biases. Including the smirks and questions.

In an average of say, 30 people who should have read your work, one may like a sentence, even just one sentence, that keeps running inside his head while getting himself dizzy in a swing at the town plaza. That would be a pay-off already.

So, there Jom. There will be self-doubts, criticisms directed at yourself by yourself but the hardest part---that knuckle you want to unfist-is really when you are already faced with that monitor and you begin interrogating yourself of that most dreaded statement so many writers might have faced in their own personal anxieties, exiles, deadlines, retributions and innumerable states of euphoria : “Now, begin to write!”

I have never encountered a more fearful situation than that (hahahaha). Anyway, keep on reading. I have a lot to learn and unlearn. People like you who keep on listening to me despite my incomprehensible talks contributed to the creation of stories growing fungus at the back of my mind that I am in constant ache of weeding out. I have not made one yet but I will make sure that I should have finished one before I expire. I will bring it to Jesus, if your friend is allowed in heaven. (insert guffaws). Who knows, He could be that guy who got himself dizzy in that swing with MY line humming in His head.

Thanks again…keep on living creatively.

Your friendly nonsense,
Iris