Rational Insanity
Literary criticism -- a painful route to literary excellence
In my younger days, I used to want to have my pieces looked at by my grandmother, Alicia Argos, who is an English teacher. The grammatical corrections she made became very enriching input for me because she would normally explain the reasons behind the corrections. Aside from just having my work corrected by my grandmother, I was always expectant of hearing comments from her -- being her grandson, she would always give me positive comments. This is the main reason why I always had her look at my work. When I heard her comments, I felt like a Pulitzer Prize winner; after all, this is what families are for, to make us feel good even in our worst.
Nowadays, when I would ask her to show me the copies of my earlier attempts at poetry or prose, I could easily say to myself that what I wrote were not even close to getting me a 3rd place in a school poetry or prose contest, but at least, I can easily say that the desire to become a writer was always there, and I acknowledge the fact that if not for the positive affirmations my grandmother used to give me, and still continues to give, I would have lost my passion for literature ages ago.
Now, some of my mentors call me a masochist. I clearly recall Mam Merly Alunan asking me why I seemed to enjoy how other panelists criticized my work during the 1st Panagsugat Fellowship in Cebu. She concluded that I was probably a masochist. I jokingly smiled at her and said, 'It is not really the pain of the criticism that I am after, but the passion for improvement that the criticism inevitably results to.' I realized that when people criticize our work to the most painful degree, those of us who are really bent on becoming writers resolve within ourselves to make sure that should we again submit pieces to fellowships for criticism, these pieces should have improved much nearing worthiness of praise and emulation instead of criticism.
I have been to numerous workshops and fellowships already and every now and then there is an adamant writer who refuses to submit to the criticism given by the panelist who are in themselves well-accomplished in the field of literature. Most of the time, these adamant individuals blindly defend their work with justifications like, 'the piece is not meant to be understood', or 'the piece is abstract', or 'i don't read much'; and most of the time if not all the time, these justifications are burnt to the ground with scholarly, witty, and academic (if not even painful) remarks from the expert panelists. I must admit that for someone to give a painful comment of my work means having to deal with the commentor's preferences in my work, but then again, I have a basis for which comment to take into consideration and which not to - I size up my commentor and consider his/her achievements in the literary field, and then I finally say to myself, 'Ahhhh, he/she really knows what he/she is talking about and there is no other route to go but to heed his/her criticism.'
As writers, we are all only as good as our last performance and we cannot expect criticism to ensure that each of our performances are good enough, however, we can always count on criticism to standardize our work in such that we develop a signature in our work. True, people change their preferences, and our work may not always look the same to the same people years from now - even my own childhood poetry does not look quite the way they did to me before when I read them as a Pulitzer Prize Winning Child Writer/Illusionist. Criticism is vital in ensuring that our literary creative mind becomes fused with the basic principles of literature - criticism is the furnace that will make brazen writers shine and shimmer like gold. Criticism is painful, there is no question about that, but a simple analogy would explain why it has to be painful - nobody ever learned to ride a bicycle without going through days of bruises, swollen muscles and joints, and wounds while in training. Literature requires that we all learn to ride the bicycle and take it full circle, and relearn it every time we want to take it on ride.
I probably won't get my pulitzer moment, after all, simply because there is no such thing as a literary adult, literaturists all grow eternally, and yet remain surprisingly young eternally as well - honestly, Marcel told me that the Pulitzer is only for Americans, so, if not for any other reason, no Filipino is really going to get it, hehehe.
Be rational; be insane... every once in a while! TTFN!
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