ALTHOUGH I address this question every time I need to put words on paper as part of my work being an academic and a columnist, I still do not have a quick and fast answer to this basic query. In fact, I am stymied because these questions seem like direct interrogations about my value as a person, that is related to the work that I do basically stringing words together day-in and day-out.
This week, I am forced to confront the question directly after having been asked by the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP) to deliver lectures during their annual gathering of Mindanao campus journalists in Lake Sebu.
Even in high school or college, I never fancied myself as a “writer.” I regarded friends who were Collegian staffers, the student publication of UP-Diliman, with a secret jealousy bordering on disdain. I took close tabs of who assumes the post of editor-in-chief and swoon or mock his or her first editorial piece depending on whether it was well-written or not.
Maybe it was the inflated esteem I gave to the art of writing and those talented enough to pull it off that caused me to never apply at the campus newspaper. I felt as though I would never be able to measure up to the set standards no doubt skewed in favor of the ones who were schooled in private institutions with excellent English lessons. Me, I had to rely on the only Hardy Boys set at our grade school library to attain my limited vocabulary growing up.
But I guess some dreams do come true. Decades later, in this particular week, I have been invited by young campus journalists, the kind who I once secretly disdained and admired at the same time, to talk to them about the craft of writing. I am finally initiated into that tight circle of young writers as an elder expert of sorts. At least, that is how I feel. But does this oblique recognition make me, indeed, a writer? Again, what makes a writer?
Not all writers, to borrow an idea from Orwell, are born equal, it seems. Anyone who has gained formal education writes to make them functional members of society given their roles in its division of labor. On a daily basis, people write receipts, reports, spreadsheets, and the like as a matter of course.
Does the skill to put together a set of coherent sentences to drive home a point make one automatically a writer? Or is there some higher standard that should be used to distinguish those who merely string words together as if they were soulless building blocks of staid formal documents in contrast to those who build new and wide vistas to the reader’s imagination with their words?
I think the difference lies in a writer’s intent. Like a letter that is intended for someone, a written piece always has an intended audience. A salaried corporate hack writes for his bosses about the dangers of investing in a particular South African nation – the parochial and specific reach does not make him or her a writer. I believe a writer becomes a writer when he or she begins to write for a wider abstract audience.
I am reminded of a poignant idea by pioneering sociologist George Herbert Mead of the symbolic interactionist school. A growing toddler first achieves a partial personhood when he or she begins to, via the learning of language, see the world through the eyes of significant others. For instance, a child realizes that her mother, father, brother and sister, do not like it when she spills soup. A child achieves complete personhood when she finally realizes that, by way of example, one does not spill soup in general. Thus, it is when a child recognizes the existence of society and its demands that a full human personality is shaped.
I am putting forward a similar idea. A writer becomes a “writer” when this consciousness of an abstract wider audience is recognized. He or she becomes a “writer” when the written piece extends its reach from the personal or the utilitarian to address an abstract wider audience or the society-at-large. The act of writing becomes vital and imbued with greater meaning when it achieves this form, every piece becoming a love letter addressed to a mass audience.
Writing thus becomes something more than just putting words together and thereby gains an important social function. It becomes the means by which we as members of society can converse among ourselves, a platform through which we can collectively chart new paths and directions together.