“Write what you know”, is a mantra that literature and creative writing professors tell their students. Edgar Calabia Samar takes this seriously by creating a character whose desires revolve around the realm of writing itself. Daniel, the hero of the art piece, discloses the chapters of the novel by being a storyteller that repeatedly shifts in voice, person, situation, and mood. Why do novel writers separate the “real” literary work from the “making” of the literary work when they can simply fuse and package them into one book? More, why do novelists need to think of a plot of the novel when the very “making” of the novel can pass as a great plot? Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog is created by a writer who creates a main character dreaming to be a writer who formulates philosophies and employs narrative voices which he has learned from a dozen of other popular writers which the main character uses to imagine characters that he is imagining, or dreaming, to write. This project, this creation of labyrinths through playing with the scheme of “writer within a writer within a writer ellipsis” , is what makes Samar’s work a difficult read, if difficult means trying painfully to find “what The Author Samar wants to say” according to the conventional structuralist/beginning-muddle-end method of literary interpretation.
