[OPINION] Being an author of books in 700 words

Duterte launched Isang Kaibigan in November 2023.

Books are a godsend.

Reading a good book is like snatching a star in the middle of the night and placing it under a microscope. Oh, the sumptuousness of letting a good book reveal its well-kept secrets. Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón said in his novel, The Shadow of the Wind, "Books are mirrors: You only see in them what you already have inside you."

A bad book, on the other hand, can leave readers endlessly sick in the pancreas, with hives growing in places where they ought not to be.

By “bad book,” I mean the haunting possibility it was plagiarized, racked by a-million-and-seven typos beginning with the Table of Contents, lines edited using a spatula, nausea pretending as syntax, and a storyline much too cliché it feels like popping antihistamines.

So, when on that rather gloomy afternoon I chanced upon a post on Facebook that Vice President Sara Duterte had ventured into children’s book writing, I nearly choked on a scathing adjective.

What audacity, what fiend from the nether regions poked her to do this?

What spoiled the Cuisses de Grenouille is the P10 million budget she said she needed to distribute the book. Are we here talking of out-of-her-own-pocket expenses or taxpayers’ money?

That’s not all. Others have pointed out that the VP’s children’s book, titled Isang Kaibigan, has apparent similarities in storyline with Andy Runton’s Owly series, published in the 2000s. Runton is an American writer and artist.

I hate to even ask the question, but could Sara’s book have been—my goodness!—plagiarized?

The Office of the Vice President was quick to dispel rumors of plagiarism. In a statement, the VP defended her book by first saying that “It is easy to write short stories more so when it is about personal experiences,” as though such a skill—hogwash at best—would deter anyone from copying another’s work.

Any writer with a siomai of sense knows that writing—for children and adults, for the intelligent and the stupid—is everything but easy.

If I have learned anything in all of 15 books under my name, it is that writing, as author and journalist Gene Fowler had aptly said, “… is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and wait for drops of blood to form on your forehead.” Sarcasm intended, of course.

There is more reason to suspect “easy” writing than the real one, Chip Scanlan, affiliate faculty member of The Poynter Institute, said.

I, for one, would warn anybody from writing a book. It is not your ticket to the stars, neither should it fool anyone into thinking that writing books would one day make you a genius. One unchanging fact in this profession is that as time trickles by, one writer’s ignorance grows with it.

Fifteen books and forty years of weaving letters into words, words into lines, I can truly say I am none the wiser for it. Moreover, royalties hardly make one feel royal. The effects of malnutrition, blah, blah, you know what I mean.

Besides, didn’t Scriptures warn us that “the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body”? Check King Solomon’s Ecclesiastes. Addiction to vanity is real, peeps!

Allow me to be kind. I have no objections to the Vice President writing a book. The right to free expression assures her this much.

However, some caveats. She should understand that writing is a political act because it engages the body politic. It is thus necessary on the Vice President’s part to be open to criticism about her work, and she should not in any way think that her title would prevent such critiques from being trebuchet-ed.

If she needs P10 million as distribution budget, then I strongly suggest pinpointing Apollo Quiboloy’s whereabouts. The national budget should be off-limits.

Lastly, writing is an art, therefore it requires some grey matter, and bottomless imagination. There are rules to writing that she must first learn, and one of them is humility. More to the point, bad writing makes comprehension impossible.

One final proviso: Write on the side of caution. A child’s mind should be a treasure house of good things. Feed them trash and they will take this into their future. Writing bears the moral imperative of spending time and energy to know the truth, grasp it, and spread it.

Uneducated opinion counts for nothing.

This article [OPINION] Being an author of books in 700 words was originally published in PhilSTAR L!fe