The MFA application essay

For me, writing is an affliction. A terrible, terrible affliction.

This essay, for instance, had been torturous to write. In my desire to write The Great Graduate School Application Essay that will give me the 101% chance of getting into the Creative Writing program, I had spent one too many long-suffering nights bleeding over the keyboard for the words that would best describe my dreams, my goals and my ambitions to the Graduate Admissions Powers-That-Be. Unfortunately, the keys that I had been hitting for the most part had been the DEL and backspace keys.

You’d ask, what’s the big deal, right? It's a fairly simple task. There're five questions. I have five answers. This should be a breeze.

Right. But, no. Not really.

Because how exactly am I going to impress upon the Powers-That-Be that learning, training, immersing in Creative Writing is something that I have absolutely wanted since I was nine years-old? That childhood fairy tales, speculative fiction and surrealistic novels are no longer enough to satiate my hunger for bizarre realms and so I need to be able to create something more? Something of my own?

I want to explore this world a different way. I want to give an alternate view of how things began, how things will end and what happens in between. I want to be able to weave Eastern and Western mythologies together – not to make things all the same, but to show how differentiations like that are better off like many rivers flowing into one sea, instead of being two lakes closed off to one another.

I want my universe, my characters and the stories that go with them to be immortalized through writing. They've all been hanging around me too long and I need to get them out of my system and move on. Properly. Otherwise, they'd just keep coming back to haunt me endlessly.

I'm not aiming to be a famous writer. Fame would be a likely by-product of worldwide readership but it's not my ultimate goal. I just want to inspire as many readers as possible to make them move an inch at the very least, or just have something in their heads click. I want them to have "Hmm..." and "AHA!" moments reading the books I will write in the next five, or ten, or for as long as I can still type or hold a pen between my fingers.

You can say that it's my own way of changing the world, one reader at a time.

I'd say it's just my way of putting Philippine Literature into the limelight, and in a permanent spot on the map of World Literature.

Some romanticized person might probably even hazard saying it's the grand entrance of Philippine Literature in the world scene.

I... wouldn't know what to say.

I just want to write, write, and be read by as many people as possible. I want to bring pride to the country and to my fellow Filipino writers; and writing is the only way that would make it possible.

And I think, I don't know how else to stress that.

I suppose we could put it this way: If say, for example, I did not believe that writing is what I have been called to do for the rest of my life, I would have spent the many painful nights of essay-writing partying out or sleeping in. I couldn’t have cared less for the constant mockery of the blinking cursor on a pristine document, because in place of my word processor would have been a DOTA window. Or Youtube. Or Facebook. Or something. Anything.

But with this essay and the rest of the happy application family in your hands right now, maybe I can now officially consider myself a masochist.

Or just extremely ambitious and persistent.

Your call.

.....

The guide questions for the essay can be found here.