When most writers are asked to explain why they write, they evoke the usual responses: they are heeding the call of the archetypal storyteller, and they are perhaps also trying to approximate the divinity of creation. Thomas Berger once famously said, “Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there”—with such pronouncement, the writer aims to be God-like in the piecing together of a universe peculiar to his literature.

But the Pulitzer Prize-winning James A. Michener may have said it best when he tried to explain why he wrote stories: “I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.”

I like that word “obligation” that Michener uses, because the fact of the matter is—and this all of us here may know to be a throbbing truth—nobody really forces anybody to write stories, and in fact one can handily go through life without knowing how it is like to write well, or to read well.

And yet we write. And we back our choices up by constructing a sense of personal aesthetics that would explain why indeed we write, and why we write what we do write.

Which is as well—but what is not often considered in the general landscape of literary psychoanalysis (at least by the same amount of scrutiny that writing gets as a tool for both entertainment and creation) is that writing may be a way for fictionists to begin to understand his own self and his world. As Elizabeth Bowen said of it: “Any fiction … is bound to be transposed autobiography.” In other words, to write is often a way for the writer to process whatever it is that occupies or even troubles him, and to render that process into words is his way of inscribing that act to seek understanding.

In considering the writing trajectory that I have had so far, I notice that where I am currently and where I sense I am going is a direct offshoot of where I came from. Which takes me back to my first stories—the first ones that I worked on which displayed a conscious literary design.

Last week, while cleaning out an old closet, I came across several stories that I wrote for The Junior Sillimanian, my high school paper. When I was a freshman, I wrote a story I titled “The Australian and My Auntie Lita,” which was about a boy in a small provincial barrio telling the story of his young aunt who has just become a mail-order bride for a blond Australian man. When I was a sophomore, I wrote another story titled “Philodendron,” which was about one summer in the lives of two best friends, both boys, who get a taste of forbidden attraction. When I was a junior, I had written another story titled “My Short(age of a) Story,” which was about a male high school feature-writer who, to survive the fast approaching deadline set by his paper adviser, desperately embarked on a literary collaboration with a female classmate named Maria Fe, a partnership which soon proved to be a recipe for disaster and high jinks. It was fiction for the Sweet Valley High crowd. Upon publication, the story proved so popular that I was ordered by my editor to write a sequel. Reading all these stories 16 years later, I think of them as cute embarrassing little things—but I don’t hold them in disdain the way most writers behold their own sophomoric writings. They are to me artifacts of a writing history. This is where I came from, these stories.

In the end, this was also true: those stories were perfect photocopies of the real in my own life. There were indeed several young aunts in my family who made it a tireless vocation to become pen pals to foreign men. There was a childhood best friend with curly hair, a Spanish nose, and a sweet disposition. And there was a high school deadline, a quagmire of a writing block, a classmate named Maria Fe, and a desperation to write something, anything. I remember writing them to understand things that were happening to me: Why was my family like this? Why did I feel this way for another boy? What could I write when I couldn’t write about anything else? I had blended elements from real life, and out came the first fruits of my own fiction—the wonderful paradox of creating stories.

Like Cesar Ruiz Aquino, who keeps confessing that he is incapable of writing fiction that is divorced from his own reality, autobiography was the name of my own stories—barely disguised attempts to fictionalize my wanderings into my psyche, which may be why the first story I ever published for a mainstream publication, the Sands and Coral literary journal, was titled “My Name is Not Oscar Wilde.” Emphasis on the words “my name.” Emphasis on the negation of an icon. It was a story of a gay boy trying to come to terms with his own burgeoning sexuality, which he himself does not understand.

The stories that followed, especially those that came after my own stint as fellow for fiction in the 2000 Dumaguete National Writers Workshop under National Artist Edith Lopez Tiempo, were perhaps more mature renditions of the same tendency to look inside my own self, in an effort to understand myself better—and perhaps also in an effort to make other people understand who I was. To be continued…