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a l i z a r i n R E D the red light district |
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Wednesday, 30 January 2008 I recently read one of Butch Dalisay's blog entries, Why we don't write more novels (but should), and I was struck by some of the things he said about Filipino writers:Novels traditionally demand sweeping views from the mountaintop. Our problem is, we have very few mountaintops here in the Philippines; of the few that we have, even fewer of us have the lungs or the inclination to scale them. Instead we have become master pedestrians, or masters of the street scene, which is why we do so well with the short story, which requires little more than a few hours or a few days of action in places like cafeterias, boarding houses, and alleyways. We often complain that our attention span as a people is very short—such that the past 30 years of our politics might as well never have happened, since no real wrongs have been redressed and no one has really been punished as we lurch from one mishap to the next. That might explain why our attention spans as readers and writers are equally brief. We see history as a distant, bloody, romantic past that we dress up for to commemorate—not as the continuously unraveling, insidiously common thread it is. He made a really good point. Why should we limit ourselves to our immediate fictional space when there is a vast expanse out there for us to explore and write about? I think it's about time we start exploring unfamiliar territories--no matter how uncomfortable we find the unknown to be. We shouldn't wait for inspiration to come. Instead, we have to go out and meet it. Hay. Exhale. Labels: writing
posted by Anonymous @ 10:41 0 Comments:
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