By: Iris P. Concepcion
"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. 9/10 of life unmiraculously constitute these things. A portion of humanity might have founded empires and recreations about their glories might have influenced narrative genres from fantasy to folk tale."
"Most of the pivotal 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."
"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 with 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."
You may ask, who am I quoting this time?
MYSELF.