And so there I was, early Tuesday afternoon, staring at my bare feet reflected on the TV screen which was off. I was, now and then, trying to read snatches of a novel, but I was sleepy and it was the sleepiness of the bored, the drained, the weary. As I lay there on my bed I realized, of all things, how easy it is now for writers to write. Computers are so affordable that even kids can own them.
In college, I submitted term papers and essays that had to be typewritten, which, for me, was a tedious task. I would marvel at my older cousin, the playwright/screenwriter, who could sit before his lightweight, light blue Olympus and pound away at its keys all day and all night. How easy he made it appear. It wasn’t, for me.
I tried using his typewriter for my first newspaper assignment in Manila 19 years ago. It was a feature story about scotch tape, and I’m not kidding. The paper I rolled into the typewriter was in ruins after 30 minutes. I had too many false starts and too many erasures for which I used the capital letter “X” to type over the offending sentences and paragraphs. I didn’t even think of using correction fluid because I knew I would have needed a gallon of it. I gave up on the Olympia and returned to my weapons, so to speak, of choice: a pad of ruled yellow paper, a No. 2 Mongol pencil and a Staedtler eraser, white and rectangular. That was how I wrote the draft of my stories before I sat down in front of a typewriter and hack my way through a, more or less, clean copy for submission.
In the newsroom, the old editors clung to their Olivetti typewriters, which they used with two fingers. I’ll never forget the sight of our news editor at his desk in the dark, during a power outage, with a penlight flashlight in his mouth, aimed at his typewriter, as he re-wrote the dispatches from the provinces.
It didn’t take long before I switched to the next best thing we had in the office — a Panasonic word processor. It was metallic gray and black and looked like a microwave with a computer keyboard attached to it. I had already convinced myself that I couldn’t possibly write a clean draft right away. That it was a solemn and slow process, writing, best done longhand. But then I tried using the word processor and it changed my, well, life. My copy was cleaner and the process was painless. (I developed a backache after typing my college term paper all night, on the eve of the deadline.)
There is a qualitative difference, however, between writing longhand and with a computer. You can actually see your musings, the murkiness that gradually thins out, when you write with a pencil or a ballpen. You can look back at your first thoughts and the revisions, which, in turn, may result in new insights. But with a computer, the draft before you, more likely than not, will be the final version. You can delete paragraphs and change words with a sweep of the mouse. The computer even checks your spelling as you type the words. Your only enemy is a power outage. As a writer in Manila in the early 1990s, when six to 12-hour outages were the norm, I’d learned to press “Ctrl” “S” after typing each sentence. Even though our computers here in the newsroom are connected to a UPS, I’m doing it right now as you’re reading this. There.
But my PC at home doesn’t have a UPS and sometimes I had to write during a power outage or somewhere where there are no computers. And this why I always have a notebook and ballpens in my knapsack, or stuck into the book I carry around. I’ve written several editorials seated on a stationary bicycle at the gym, or in the semi-darkness of my room, during a power outage. I also write down my thoughts and ideas while doing something else, wherever I may happen to be. I’ve turned exactly into what as a fifth grader I thought I ought to be when I grow up. A lean, mean writing machine. OK, the “lean” part is stretching it a bit.
I must also admit that I roll my eyes every time I hear someone whine about writer’s block. There is no such thing. There is only laziness or, which is the same thing, an unwillingness to squeeze the subject at hand, and make it produce the required number of words.
You’re a writer because you want to, and you can, write. But my lolo, my grandpa, who died two years ago at the age of 103, had another theory. A hardcore Marcos supporter, he said I became a journalist because of my idol, Ninoy Aquino, the martyred former senator who was executed, in broad daylight, on the airport tarmac, by the minions of the Marcos regime for leaving Boston and returning to the Philippines. Ninoy was in his teens when he got the plum assignment that veterans reporters at that time were begging for — the frontline in Korea, during the Korean War. He got the job because of his father, a former senator who served as Quezon’s secretary of agriculture and was the speaker of the National Assembly and vice president during the Japanese occupation. Aquino Sr. was a friend of the Manila Times’ publisher. I later learned that the editors were cussing Ninoy as they edited his godawful dispatches. But what did they expect? He was 17!
In any case, I wanted to be a writer to inflict my opinions and fictions on the world, perhaps even change it a bit. The only alternative, I thought back then, was to grow old, fat and rich.
I’m still surprised to hear journalists say they’re in it for the “money.” What are you doing in a newsroom then? I would ask them. Go back to school. Be a nurse. Better yet, be a doctor, a lawyer, an actor — or get into politics. That’s where the money is.
Tomorrow, I told myself on Tuesday, lying in bed, feverish, coughing, sneezing and aching — tomorrow I would feel much better, and I would write all this, put it away, and return to it on early Thursday morning for the final draft.
Life couldn’t be better.
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