“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”—Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
As a young man several woebegone Presidents ago, I hardly thought of writing as a full-time profession. The most was that it was a hobby people with too much time in their hands get into to keep the brain from turning into bird’s nest soup.
In most parents’ mind back then, in order to make a decent living, my generation’s profession of choice was limited into a bucket list which included medicine, law, and engineering. Anything that even hinted of the arts, like writing or dancing or even sculpting, were scorned.
Journalism, in particular, drew flak because most parents thought the job differed little from rumor-mongering. The writing of poems and fictional stories, on the other hand, was thought to belong only to the mentally disturbed.
It comes therefore as no surprise that my first years at the university had little to do with writing and had everything to do with dissecting frogs, fowl, and heinously murdered cats. Luckily for me, my dreams of being a world-renowned heart surgeon was cut short by my pathological violent outbreaks topped with wanting to be a priest.
Yes, you read it right the first time.
But this, too, lasted no longer than the life span of a gastrotrich (go look it up in Google). Shortly after I was shooed away from the Holy Apostles Senior Seminary in Makati City, I lost no time writing poems, short stories and essays’ either in the confines of my room or any patch of paradise where I could splurge hours by my lonesome.
With barely any training, to say little of mentors in sight, I whisked past book after book, all I could get my hands on via the legal tender or the art of filching, starting with German, French, and Russian authors, and kicked off what I thought then was the genesis of a prodigious writing life.
It took me several years and numerous submissions to publications before one of my short stories got published in the magazine where I now sit as editor-in chief. I thought the rejections devious because they nearly cost me my career as a writer even before it got off the ground.
It wasn’t easy being told, in the graceful language rejection slips have become notorious for, that you’re not good enough, or that your grammar can best serve humanity as two-ply tissue paper. The blow to the ego was such that recovery was well-nigh futile and the act of licking your wounds almost resembled a dung beetle’s food festival.
Be that as it may, I grit my teeth, popped my knuckles and went on writing. I soon got a job as a freelance journalist for an obscure magazine to make ends meet. By this time, I had two lovely kids with an appetite for the out-of-my-wallet’s-league bacon and hotdogs.
I cared little whether my pieces were read or not, so long as I got paid. I read and wrote, read and wrote, until my fingers ached and my eyes begged for sleep. Whoever said that writing is a lazy man’s job must be absolutely out of his freakin’ mind. I have come to learn, and this painfully, that a simple sentence that makes sense is the hardest thing in the world to craft.
Having young excellent writers who started out early in their careers helped little to inspire me to sling myself past the initial jealousy. I therefore decided to add to my readings several classic and modern authors using my poor excuses for freelance wages.
I read each book not only for entertainment, which is always a good way to start a reading regimen, but for closer study. I rummaged for beautiful turns of phrase, words I’ve not encountered, and even learned their etymology and meaning.
I read and wrote every single day, rarely missing a beat. I kept those pieces which didn’t pass muster under lock and key, and read them over the weekend to know where I failed. From a fairly blathering and long-winded way of writing, I began to trim each line down to size. Took me the next three decades to discipline my mind to think in shorter lines.
I soon got a job as a stevedore for a popular meat company. Back then, this meant logging in nearly 20 hours of workload, which included traveling to nearby provinces in a delivery van and hauling 1.9 tons of canned produce to groceries and wet markets.
To bag an extra P300 on top of my P150 per day salary, we took detours to other groceries to haul back nearly half a ton of spoiled meats. My day kicked off at four in the morning and ended sometime midnight the next. Suffice that for four years, I spent my reading and writing largely inside the van.
Most things fell into place after I left the meat hauling business to begin a career in a nationally-circulated newspaper as its ‘editorial assistant,’ a fancy title for messenger-janitor. After close to two years of sweeping the newsroom of loose trash, dusting the library (reading the books as well) and brewing coffee for the editors, I finally got my chance to write when a reporter called in sick and was advised by his doctor to take a month’s leave of absence.
It wasn’t some earthshaking investigative report, far from it. It was an article on a branded lightbulb which the advertising department needed to come out with the next day. Since I was the only warm body not out on the beat that morning, they had no choice but to risk giving me the assignment.
“Can you write in English and do the interview?” the editor asked, to which I replied, “How difficult can asking questions be?”
To cut to the chase, the article appeared on one of the center-page sections of the paper the next day—with my name on it. Since then, my pieces have appeared in most newspapers and magazines of note, until I ended up in the Philippines Graphic as its managing editor in 2008, then as editor-in-chief in April 2009.
In 2013, my first two books were published: Blood Republic (a collection of political essays) by the Philippines Graphic Publications Inc. and The Distance of Rhymes and Other Tragedies (a collection of short fictional stories) by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House (USTPH). Another book, The Chief is in the House, a collection of nonfiction pieces, was published by the USTPH on 2015.
This year, my fourth book, Shot Glass, a collection of my social media engagements, will be launched by the Ateneo de Naga University Press in October. The University of the Philippines Press will be launching my fifth nonfiction book—I, Journalist—come November 2019. Three other manuscripts are waiting approval in three academic presses.
I recall these days with much fondness because after close to four decades of writing, 15 years of which I’ve worked as a journalist and editor, I remain a student of letters. Aside from observing life around me, I stuck to my regimen of reading and writing every single day. This is over and above the writing I do each week for the magazine and book manuscripts which need finishing.
It’s a lonely job, that much I can say. Spending close to 15 hours each day by your lonesome is not exactly my idea of a good time. It helped, though, that I’m an introvert and would rather be caught dead locked with my own thoughts than listening to others blabber all day long about their new iPhones or Argyle socks. The interview is as much socialization I get outside the Bacchanalian sprees I enjoy with fellow writers.
To want to be a writer is to want to pay the price for a profession too jealous to leave you to accomplish other things. It’s a rather steep price for wanting to do what you love most, but one worth its weight in gold. While the return on investment may leave the writer always wanting, to say little of that sense of servitude gnawing at your nape, to the writer, the act of writing itself is its own reward.
Stephen King was right in saying there’s no two ways around it: writers must read and write. Not for anything else but for what the late Colombian novelist and journalist Gabriel García Márquez once wrote in the Spanish-language newspaper El País in 1982: “I have always believed that good writing is the only happiness that is enough in and of itself.”
Joel Pablo Salud is the editor-in-chief of the Philippines Graphic magazine, the sister publication of the BusinessMirror. He is the author of fiction and nonfiction books and is a member of the Philippine Center of the International PEN, Akademyang Filipino and the Manila Critics Circle. He travels around the country annually to conduct lectures on Journalism Ethics to journalists on campus. “The Workshop” is a monthly column by the author which deals with writing.