Filipino Novelists

The big question is, how many Filipino novelists will rise to this occasion (presuming they're interested in winning prizes -- which, believe me, no matter what they say, they are)?

I've recently found myself wondering about the answer to that question, which seems to be "Not very many." When I attended the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize ceremonies in Hong Kong earlier this month, there was some curiosity about the state of the Filipino novel. (We have to realize, of course, that in the currency of global literary publishing, the novel is just about the only thing that counts -- not the poem, not the short story, not the play.)

I told them that the novel was alive and well in the Philippines -- that our writers in both English and Filipino were coming out with new work every year. On the other hand, the volume of work being done was nothing to crow about. Few novels were being written, and -- like my own recent one, Soledad's Sister -- most of them were slim, no more than 200 pages in published form. Dean Alfar's Salamanca (2006), for example, is 159 pages; F. Sionil Jose's Vibora (2007) is just 118. Based on the current proofs, Soledad's Sister will be around 180 pages when it comes out early next year. A notable exception is Charlson Ong's 368-page Banyaga (2007).

Of the short story, on the other hand, we have no shortage. I was a judge in this year's Palanca Awards for the short story in English, and I believe that we received the highest number of entries ever in this category -- 147 stories.

By comparison, of the 243 qualified novels received by the Man Asian, only about 10, I was told, came from the Philippines. More than half came from South Asia (mostly India, whose authors also accounted for 11 of the 23 works on the prize's long list -- four of them from just one city, Chennai). Ten novels from Manila is not a bad turnout for a new contest, except that, as with the other countries, these presumably included works that had long been in progress, or had been started much earlier.

It should be interesting to see how many novels turn up for the three big events next year.

These competitions will certainly encourage the writing of more novels, but they still won't change the fact that we Filipino fictionists don't write nearly as many novels as our neighbors do. The question is, why?

My own quick answer is, why should we? At least until recently, we haven't seen enough artistic and other incentives to consistently write and publish novels, or to choose to write novels over other alternatives. As every novelist knows, writing a novel typically takes several years. Even if the physical act of writing it could be much shorter than that, the novel as a project takes a much larger and longer emotional and psychological toll on the writer than a story, poem, or essay will. We sleep, eat, defecate, and fornicate with our novels perched on our shoulders.

And all of this for what? For a first and most likely a last edition of 1,000 copies, which will take over a year to sell, if it does at all. Even at a relatively high royalty of 15 percent, presuming the book sells for a modest P300 or just over $6 a copy, a Filipino novelist will stand to earn P45,000 or about $1,000 for a few years' work. There will be no overseas markets, no film rights, no residuals, and -- unless the book is picked up by schools for teaching -- no reprints to look forward to.

This isn't to say that all we should write for is fortune and fame -- although a little of both will always be welcome. Stories, poems, plays, and essays won't get us very far, either. But given a range of options, the Filipino writer can hardly be blamed if he or she chooses less tedious forms of artistic expression. Short stories, for example, can be written in a matter of days and published within months; screenplays can give vent to our novelistic impulses, aside from earning us much more, provided we make the right connections and break into the industry.

But other than material reasons, I suspect that we Filipinos don't write novels as much as we write other forms of literature because -- and I realize how controversial this statement might be -- we generally don't have the sensibility or the athleticism