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By RICKY LEE

In my thirty-plus years of writing screenplays, I have never lost the desire to go back to what I always wanted to do — write fiction. Every now and then I would threaten to write a novel, but I never got around to doing it. Until last year. That’s why my first novel, Para Kay B (o kung paano dinevastate ng pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa atin), is sort of a homecoming for me.

It is back to writing from your guts — with no worry of producers breathing down your neck, or directors reinterpreting your vision. In fiction, I am utterly, dangerously, solely responsible.

These past three years I hibernated. I still did my work as creative manager for ABS-CBN, handling such teleseryes as Maging Sino Ka Man, Lobo and Kahit Isang Saglit. But during my off hours, I started writing the drafts for three novels simultaneously. I easily get bored so that’s how I usually operate. Even in writing scripts, I would work on two to three at the same time.

The first novel was about four historical periods in our country and how the powers that be always erase history for their own sake. The second was a political satire entitled Aswang. The third was Para Kay B, a collection of five love stories. From 2005 to 2007, I kept shifting back and forth on the three novels; it was only in 2008 that I started to focus mainly on Para Kay B.

As I wrote, I listened. I talked to students, teachers, fellow writers, fathers, mothers, lovers, lesbians, nurses, carpenters. I wanted to write a novel that would sound just like the people around us. I focus-grouped my early drafts with students and young professionals, my target reading market; and then I’d go back to my computer to rewrite. Then listened and focus-grouped some more; and then rewrote again. For the title of the novel, I even surveyed three options among more than a hundred friends and colleagues. I didn’t want to be so arrogant as to think that I knew everything. I wanted to know; I hungered to know. And I tried to put that in writing.

I went through this entire process because I wanted to be read in the MRTs, in jeepneys, in hospitals, in flights going to the US. I wanted to be read by the lolos and the lolas, the ninangs and the ninongs, the kapitbahay, the guy who has not touched a book in his life, the girl who just wants to be loved. I wanted my fiction to be like music — accessible to everybody. People would tell me — nobody reads novels, especially in Filipino, unless assigned in school. I wanted to take up the challenge.

For me, music and writing go together. I can’t live without either one. On my first trip to New York, I spent hours in a record store smelling freshly-minted vinyl records. I did the same thing with the first printed draft of my novel — I  smelt it and knew everything was all right in my world.

Music does that for me. Being a probinsyano at heart, having been born and growing up in Daet, Camarines Norte, I wake up at 5 or 6 a.m. every day. I am most creative in the morning. My daily ritual is to have music from my CD player playing beside me as I type on the computer. Usually it’s rock; the beat pushes me, the energy enlivens me. Music and writing — they always go together for me. But sadly I am not a musician. I am just a writer.

Read more of Ricky Lo’s blog entry in the February 2009 issue of S Magazine.