(Fair warning: This essay contains spoilers for Teorya ng Unang Panahon, but sometimes a spoiler is an invitation rather than a deterrent, much as a known ending never keeps us from rereading what we love.)
There is a violence in the first rush of creation that disguises itself as grace, a velocity that makes you believe the work has already arrived whole and breathing, and in Teorya ng Unang Panahon there is a character—a young writer in high school—who experiences this exact delusion when he writes a twelve-page story called “Ulan” in a single six-hour session at his friend’s house, borrowing his friend’s father’s old ThinkPad laptop, working through the night in a state of such complete absorption that he forgets to eat dinner, doesn’t notice the hours passing, feels as though he has entered some higher realm where the universe itself is conspiring to help him, where the clicking of the keyboard sounds like music, where he is not just writing a story but becoming a writer, crossing some invisible threshold from wanting to making, from dreaming to doing, and when he finishes—when he types the last sentence at around three in the morning and prints two copies on bond paper he shamelessly asks to borrow, double-spaced to look professional—he is filled with such pride, such certainty that he has accomplished something real, and this confirmation makes him believe that he has arrived, that the hard work is done, that he is now a writer and will always be able to write, not understanding yet that what he has really done is create a question, not an answer, has opened a wound that will demand he return to it again and again, has begun something he does not yet know how to continue.
What makes this fictional account so detailed is that it draws directly from my own experience of writing a story also titled “Ulan”—my actual first published story, written when I was in second year high school in 1995, brought to the office of Barkada! Newsmagazine, a regional publication based in San Pablo, where I met the editor Fernando V. Cao, though I did not know then who he really was, did not know he was a history professor at the University of the Philippines, did not know he was a Palanca-awardee, did not even know what the Palanca Award was or why it might matter, knew only that he read my story and told me it wasn’t bad, wasn’t “orig na orig” but showed potential, that they would publish it after editing, that I should keep writing, and this validation felt like proof that I had been right to believe in myself, though what Sir Fer actually gave me was something I would only understand much later: not confirmation that I had arrived but permission to continue, not proof that I was a writer but encouragement to keep trying to become one, and he became my mentor during my remaining high school years, meeting with me periodically to discuss writing, lending me books, introducing me to other writers, showing me through his example that it was possible to build a life around literature, though this mentorship, invaluable as it was, did not solve the fundamental problem: what comes next?
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"There is a violence in the first rush of creation that disguises itself as grace, a velocity that makes you believe the work has already arrived whole and breathing..."
Beginning is easy compared to continuing, though perhaps nobody warns you of this when you finish that first story or poem or chapter, when you feel the rush of completion and think you have discovered the key to writing, because beginning requires only that single act of courage, that one moment when you sit down and type the first sentence, but continuing requires you to find that courage again tomorrow, and the day after that, requires you to return to the page when the initial enthusiasm has faded, when life has reminded you that you are not only a writer but also a body that must eat and sleep and pay rent, a person embedded in relationships and obligations and the hundred small necessities of survival, and this is why so many novels die not in their beginning but in their middle, not from lack of talent but from lack of continuation, from the writer’s inability to sustain attention across months and years, where doubt accumulates like sediment until you can no longer see what you were trying to make.
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In a final letter in the final section of Teorya ng Unang Panahon, the voice confesses: Ang hirap magsimula ulit pero parang mas mahirap magpatuloy lang—it is hard to start again, but it seems even harder to just continue—and this distinction captures something essential about the work of writing, because starting again at least offers the dopamine rush of novelty, the brief excitement of new beginnings, while continuing requires you to return to material that has lost its freshness, to sentences you have read so many times they no longer make sense, to a vision that seemed clear six months ago but has become murky and questionable, and you must find a way to reconnect with what animated the work originally while also accepting how you have changed, how the work has changed, how the world has changed, and somehow incorporating all of this transformation into the continuation, and the voice goes on to say: Hangga’t buhay ako, puwede akong magsimula nang paulit-ulit, puwede tayong magbago’t baguhin ng mundo, hindi ba?—as long as I am alive, I can start again and again, we can change and be changed by the world, right?—and this suggests that continuation might not be about pushing forward in a straight line but rather about the willingness to return, to begin again while carrying everything you have learned from the previous attempt, to accept that each new beginning is not a repetition but a transformation, that what Mike, the father of the missing Yannis, thinks while throwing the ngilag is true: Ang lohika ng pag-uulit ay nasa katiyakan na ang pag-uulit ay hindi ang inuulit—the logic of repetition is in the certainty that repetition is not what is repeated.
'Teorya ng Unang Panahon' was first serialized in Liwayway magazine in 25 installments from June 2021 to September 2023.
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PHOTO: Liwayway Magazine
Writing continues what living interrupts—the same life you need to accumulate material is the life that prevents you from sitting down to transform that material into prose, and you must find a way to hold both truths simultaneously, must learn to live fully enough to have something to write about while also protecting enough time and attention to actually write, and this balance is almost impossible, will always tip too far in one direction or the other, and you must make peace with this near impossibility, must accept that you will always be failing at either living or writing, learning to see that the interruptions are not obstacles to the work but part of the work, that the years you spend away from the manuscript are the life that will eventually return to the page transformed.
Teorya ng Unang Panahon took me longer to write than either of my first two novels, not because it was more difficult technically but because life intervened in ways I could not have predicted, and by life I mean not only the obvious interruptions—teaching obligations, family emergencies, the need to earn a living—but also the subtler demands of continuing to exist as a person while also trying to exist as a writer, and these two modes of existence do not always cooperate, often pull in opposite directions until you feel yourself splitting, fragmenting, becoming multiple selves that cannot communicate with each other, and you sit down to write but find that the self who sits down is not the self who knows how to write, is only the exhausted remnant of a person who has been teaching classes and grading papers and attending meetings and trying to maintain relationships and worrying about money, and this self looks at the manuscript and feels nothing, cannot remember why this work ever seemed important, and you must find a way to bridge this gap, to reconnect with the self who knows how to write, to recover the vision that first animated the work, and this recovery is harder than any technical problem, because it requires you to maintain contact with something fragile and easily lost, something that exists only when you attend to it, that disappears the moment you look away.
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"Writing continues what living interrupts—the same life you need to accumulate material is the life that prevents you from sitting down to transform that material into prose..."
The novel began as something else entirely, began with an invitation from National Artist Virgilio S. Almario, who chaired the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino then, to write a science fiction novella for high school students, and I agreed because I had an old story called “Project: EYOD” that had won the Palanca Award in 2003 that I thought I could revise and extend, and I began working with enthusiasm, with the sense that I knew what I was doing, that I had a clear assignment and a definite endpoint, but then the project was shelved when Sir Rio was replaced as chair of the KWF, and I was left with this half-finished novella that no longer had a home, that existed in a strange liminal state between commission and abandonment, and I could have simply stopped working on it, but something about it refused to stay abandoned, kept calling me back, kept insisting that it needed to be finished even if I no longer knew what I was finishing or why.
In the novel, Yannis possesses a mysterious object he called ngilag—a six-sided object that when thrown repeatedly always lands in the same sequence of letters: N-G-I-L-A-G—and through this object he can see the future, can see further and further ahead with each throw, tomorrow and next week and next month and next year, and crucially, he tells his brother that he must do something at each point he sees para magpatuloy ang mundo—so that the world can continue—and this strange gift becomes burden, this vision becomes obligation, because once you have seen what needs to be done you cannot unsee it, cannot pretend you do not know, cannot abandon the work even when you want to, and Yannis’s relationship to the ngilag mirrors the writer’s relationship to the unfinished work, the way a novel that has shown you something of itself, that has revealed even a fragment of its pattern, makes a claim on you that you cannot simply dismiss, demands that you return to it, insists that you must continue because something in the work needs to happen, needs to be written, needs to be released into the world, and your continuing is necessary not just for you but for the work itself, for the world the work might help create or sustain.
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Between 2012, when I published Sa Kasunod ng 909, and 2019, when I began seriously working on what would become Teorya ng Unang Panahon, I was writing the Janus Silang series, five books published between 2013 and 2020, dividing my attention between the young adult fantasy novels that were actually being published and what by then I already knew was not just a sci-fi novella but the third novel of the trilogy that began with Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog in 2005 but then was interrupted for almost a decade after Sa Kasunod, made myself believe I might choose to not go back to it, even if I had already made public how the trilogy would be called—Trilohiya ng mga Bilang, Trilogy of Numbers. When the Janus Silang series took over, it kept interfering with this trilogy, kept stealing titles I had planned to use—I was initially intending this third book to be Pitumpu’t Pitong Pu*a (I’m not censoring myself here, the title was intentionally that way because chapter titles were supposed to be “Puga,” “Puja,” “Puka,” “Pula,” “Puma,” “Puna,” “Pupa,” “Pusa,” and so on) but Pitumpu’t Pitong Púsong became the title of the third Janus Silang book, so this one became Santinakpan ng mga Pu*a, I thought having the number hidden in plain sight in santinakpan was a good choice, but then the fifth Janus Silang book became Ang Lihim ng Santinakpan, and I was left scrambling for another title, finally settling on Teorya ng Unang Panahon, which was also my attempt to make the academic vocabulary of teorya go hand in hand with the folk imagining of unang panahon—and this constant renaming became a metaphor for the entire experience of trying to write the trilogy while also living a life that kept making other demands, and in 2017 I was also invited to be a visiting professor at Osaka University in Japan, an invitation that required I sell my house and lot, my car, almost everything I owned—except my books—because no one would take care of them while I was gone, an invitation that was supposed to last three years but was extended for another three years, which itself was interrupted by the pandemic in 2020 so I cut the extension short and came home in 2022 after five years away, returned to teaching at Ateneo initially fully online and then gradually transitioning to onsite, and during all of this—during the years in Osaka living in an apartment with three bedrooms just by myself, surrounded by books in a language I was still learning to read, during the pandemic lockdowns when the world stopped but writing somehow had to continue, during the disorienting return to Manila after five years away—the novel was there, waiting, calling me back, refusing to stay abandoned even when months would pass without my opening the file, even when I believed I would never finish it.
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Living interrupts writing, yes, but writing also continues living, extends it, transforms it, gives it shape and meaning it would not otherwise have, and you cannot have one without the other, and the years you spend away from the novel are the life that will eventually feed back into the work, and the experience of displacement and return, of experiencing the pandemic’s radical interruption of time itself—all of this became material for understanding what Teorya ng Unang Panahon was trying to say about time and transformation and the difficulty of maintaining continuity across rupture, and I could not have understood these things without living them, without the interruptions that seemed like obstacles but were actually pedagogy, were the novel teaching me what it needed to become.
The novel alternates between three distinct narrative strands: the contemporary sections set in 2016 where Mike searches for his missing son with the help of his older son, discovering that Yannis had become a beginning activist, only to uncover the possibility that they may not be fully human, not just human; the science fiction sections set in a far future where a character named X-XIII undergoes a mysterious test called the SET in a society governed by something called the Sistema; and the epistolary sections composed of letters by someone who writes seemingly to a childhood friend but could be writing to himself, to no one—letters that oscillate between intimacy and distance, between confession and evasion—and this tripartite structure becomes a meditation on time itself, on how the past and present and future exist simultaneously in consciousness, on how we are always living in multiple temporalities at once, and the alternation between these three narrative modes creates a rhythm that mimics the actual experience of writing over years, the way you must move between different registers, leave one project and return to it later with fresh eyes, allow things to sit unfinished while you work on something else, trusting that eventually the connections will reveal themselves.
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"Living interrupts writing, yes, but writing also continues living, extends it, transforms it..."
What the novel does not announce is that these three narrative strands were not written simultaneously, were not conceived as parts of a unified whole from the beginning, but rather emerged from different moments in my writing life when I was trying to solve different problems, and the science fiction sections existed for years as a finished story, something I looked back on with pride but also with distance, as though it had been written by someone I used to be but was no longer, and I did not think there was any reason to return to it because it was already complete, but then—seventeen years later—I found myself revisiting it, wondering what it would mean not to improve it but to inhabit it differently, to enter it as a different person with different questions, and this willingness to take something you wrote in your youth and transform it into something new is itself a way of maintaining a relationship with your younger self while also allowing that work to grow and change as you have grown and changed.
And the epistolary sections emerged from my actual letters that I wrote in English for my now-discontinued TinyLetter, letters I sent to a small group of readers over several years, letters that were not fiction but attempts at direct communication, at thinking through problems in real time, at maintaining connection with people I cared about across distance and silence, and these letters existed in their own context, were not written with any thought that they would someday become part of a novel, but when I began working on Teorya ng Unang Panahon I found myself drawn back to them, rereading them and recognizing something in their rhythms that resonated with what I was trying to do, and I began to imagine what it would mean to transform them, to take these English letters written to real people and reimagine them as Filipino letters written between fictional characters, to maintain the emotional temperature and philosophical questioning while completely changing their context and purpose, and what I discovered was that you can keep writing by returning to what you have already written and asking what else it might become, and this willingness to cannibalize your own work, to treat nothing as sacred or finished, to see everything as potentially available for repurposing, is liberating because it means you are never starting from nothing, never facing the blank page without resources.
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But the novel’s structure goes even further, because the mid-section titled “Isang Pangyayari” first came out as a short story called “Isang Pangyayari sa Panahon ng Santinakpan” in the anthology Lapat: Antolohiya ng mga Kontemporaneong Kuwento edited by Luna Sicat-Cleto (who would later write the blurb for Teorya ng Unang Panahon), and the final section, like a fugue, an epilogue called “Laban sa Kalungkutan,” was actually published first in its translation to English by Kristine Ong Muslim in the anthology Destination: S.E.A 2050 published by Penguin in 2022, and this process of discovering that disparate stories belong together, that they form parts of a larger whole even though they were written without any conscious plan to connect them, and what these sections achieved was crucial—“Isang Pangyayari” brought Da-Ø’s obsessive watching of 909 films from the Panahon ng Daigdig into the novel’s investigation of how we try to understand what has been lost, how we attempt to recover the past through sustained, almost ritualistic attention to its artifacts, while “Laban sa Kalungkutan” provided the novel’s emotional reckoning through Pat’s confrontation with the mother’s voice notes about the eighteen types of ancient sadness, the question of whether happiness can be chosen or only inherited, whether we can escape the systems that shape our emotions, and these two sections, inserted into the alternating rhythm of NGILAG-GALING-LIGANG, created ruptures that allowed the novel to breathe differently, to shift registers in ways that the three-strand structure alone could not achieve, to introduce perspectives and emotional index that revealed connections between the search for a missing son, the far future’s Sistema, and the letters’ introspection, making explicit what had been implicit in the alternating sections, creating a whole that investigated not just time and loss but how we continue in the face of both.
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'Teorya ng Unang Panahon' won a Special Prize in the Palanca Awards in 2022, then was published by Ateneo Press in 2023.
PHOTO: Ateneo University Press
This experience of discovering that disparate pieces belonged together complicates the practice of maintaining a relationship with everything you have ever written, because the truth is that you cannot always tell the difference between work that is dormant and work that is actually dead, between a fragment that will eventually find its place and a fragment that you wrote badly or that belongs to a version of yourself you have outgrown, and the danger is that treating everything as potentially reusable can become a way of avoiding the harder admission that some work has failed, that some experiments led nowhere, that not everything you write deserves to be saved, and yet—and this is what makes the practice so difficult—you also cannot know in advance which pieces will matter, cannot trust your judgment in the moment about what to keep and what to discard, because the story that seems dead might be exactly what you need five years later when you have become capable of understanding what it was trying to do, and so you must hold both truths simultaneously: that most of what you write will not be reused, and that you cannot predict which pieces will prove essential, and this uncertainty means you must write without the comfort of knowing whether you are accumulating material for a larger project or simply accumulating pages that will sit in folders forever, must produce fragments without being certain they will cohere, must trust that patterns might emerge while also accepting that they might not, that the “single ongoing project” you imagine your life’s work to be might be a construction you impose retrospectively rather than something that actually exists, and this faith is not reassuring but anxious, not confident but provisional, not a guarantee but a gamble that you must remake every time you sit down to write.
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And yet despite this uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Teorya ng Unang Panahon offers an image for what continuation looks like when you cannot see the whole: Dr. Panganiban—a retired professor of philosophy with traces of babaylan lineage—explains to Mike and Gino that in ancient Tagalog, the word ligas (a tree whose fruit is both beautiful and poisonous, whose colors shift from white blossoms to green fruit to red and finally black-purple as it ripens) means hibla—strand, thread, the fiber that makes up tissue in plants and animals. He uses this etymology to construct a metaphor for reality itself: imagine reality as a woven fabric, a tapestry, and each person holds a strand of this fabric, a ligas that represents what they know, what they have experienced, what they understand about the world, but—and this is the crucial part—we tend to keep our pieces from one another, hiding our strands because we think we are protecting ourselves or the people we love, when the truth is that if all of us would reveal our strands, our ligas, maybe everyone could see the whole picture, but the question becomes: who will be the first to show their thread? That is a risk most of us are not willing to take, says Dr. Panganiban, and so we remain here, as clueless and confused as our ancestors were despite everything we think we have learned.
"...that most of what you write will not be reused, and that you cannot predict which pieces will prove essential..."
This image haunts me because it captures exactly what writing requires—the willingness to add your strand to the tapestry before you can see what the whole pattern will be, to contribute your ligas knowing that it is only one thread among many, that you cannot see the complete design, that you must trust that your partial knowledge has value even in its incompleteness, and that continuation means accepting that you will never possess the whole truth but must keep weaving anyway, keep adding to the fabric line by line, page by page, year by year, knowing that what you are making will only become visible through the accumulated work of continuing.
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But this also requires survival through periods when writing becomes literally impossible, and there were months when I did not touch the novel at all, when I looked at it and felt nothing but guilt and failure, when I believed I would never finish it, when I wondered if I should simply abandon it, and what allowed me to continue was something closer to stubbornness, to the refusal to let the novel die even when I could not work on it, to the trust that even when I was not actively writing I was still accumulating material for it, still living the life that would eventually feed into it.
This kind of writing—across years of not-writing, through interruption—is rarely discussed in writing advice, which tends to focus on daily word counts and unbroken productivity, on the romantic image of the writer who works every single day without fail, and while I do not want to dismiss the value of regular practice, I also want to acknowledge that this model is not always possible, is sometimes actively harmful, sometimes produces burnout rather than books, and that there are other models, messier and less heroic but equally valid, models that acknowledge that writers are also people with bodies that get sick and relationships that need tending and obligations that cannot be ignored, and that sometimes you must let the work rest, trusting that when you return to it you will bring with you all the living you have done in the meantime, all the new understanding you have developed, all the ways you have changed, and these changes will make the work better, will give it depth and complexity it could not have had if you had simply pushed through.
This is why Teorya ng Unang Panahon feels, at least for me, different from my first two novels, feels like it was written by someone older and more patient and more willing to accept uncertainty, because it was, because I wrote it across years when I was learning what it means to maintain commitment to work while also maintaining commitment to everything else that matters, and the novel itself enacts this acceptance of multiplicity, this refusal of single-minded focus, because its structure acknowledges that we are always thinking about multiple things simultaneously, always living in multiple temporalities at once, always dividing our attention between what we are doing now and what we did before and what we hope to do next.
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But I want to be honest about what this costs, about what it demands beyond time and effort, because the years I spent writing Teorya ng Unang Panahon were also years when I was saying no to opportunities that might have advanced my career in more visible ways, when I was turning down invitations and declining projects and disappointing people who wanted something from me that I could not give because I was committed to this difficult, less marketable, experimental novel that nobody was asking for, that no publisher had commissioned, that existed only because I insisted it should exist, and this insistence came at a cost, meant that I earned less money than I could have earned, meant that I had less time for relationships, meant that I was often tired, often stressed, often wondering if I was making a terrible mistake, if I should have been more practical, more strategic, more willing to write what the market wanted rather than what I needed to write, and I cannot tell you that this was the right choice because I do not know what would have happened if I had made different choices, but I can tell you that Teorya ng Unang Panahon could not have existed any other way, could not have been written faster or more efficiently, required every one of those seven years, required all the interruptions and returns.
"This is why Teorya ng Unang Panahon feels, at least for me, different from my first two novels, feels like it was written by someone older and more patient and more willing to accept uncertainty..."
Even when the novel seemed finished it refused to stay finished—it was first serialized in Liwayway magazine in twenty-five installments from June 2021 to September 2023, then won a Special Prize in the Palanca Awards in 2022, then was published by Ateneo Press in 2023, and is coming out in a new edition this year, and crucially, these versions are not the same, the world shift that happens in the second half after “Isang Pangyayari” occurs differently in each version, and this multiplicity of versions suggests that continuation does not end with publication, that even when you think you have arrived at the final form the work keeps teaching you what it needs to become, keeps demanding that you return to it and see it differently, and so the seven years that then became thirteen years were not just years of writing but years of rewriting, of discovering through serialization and competition and publication that each encounter with the work revealed new possibilities, that becoming the person who could write this novel meant becoming someone willing to let the novel change even as it was being released into the world.
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This willingness—to revise across multiple public versions, to accept that the “final” version is only final until you understand it better—took time, took experience, took the accumulation of living and reading and rethinking that cannot be rushed or compressed, and requires developing a relationship with writing that is not transactional, not instrumental, not about getting something but about being something, about valuing the work for itself rather than for what it might bring you, and this stance is difficult because it means going against everything your culture tells you about how to spend your time, because contemporary capitalism insists that time should be productive, should generate profit, should contribute to accumulation, and writing—real writing, the kind that requires years of sustained attention—is not productive in this sense, does not generate immediate returns, does not contribute to GDP, does not advance the project of capital accumulation, and is therefore seen as waste, as indulgence, as something you do only after you have taken care of your real obligations, only after you have secured your economic survival, only after you have earned the right to pursue your passions, but the truth is that you will never earn this right, will never have enough time or money or security, will never reach the point where writing becomes easy or convenient or risk-free, and if you wait for that point to arrive you will wait forever, will spend your entire life preparing to write rather than actually writing, and the novel you meant to write will remain forever dream, forever potential, forever deferred.
This is why we need to continue, and I use the collective “we” rather than the individual “you” because this is not only a personal struggle but also a political one, a collective refusal of the logic that says writing is waste, that anything not generating profit is not worth doing, and when we continue writing despite the economic pressure to stop, despite the cultural devaluation of literary work, we are participating in a form of resistance, insisting that there are other ways to value time and measure worth, other ways to live, and this insistence is not romantic or naive but rather a recognition that the world we inhabit is not inevitable, is the result of specific political and economic arrangements that could be otherwise, that should be otherwise, that we can help make otherwise through imagination and the sustained attention to possibility that novels require, and Teorya ng Unang Panahon attempts this work through its very structure, showing that time is not linear progression but rather complex entanglement, and this understanding of time is itself political because it refuses the logic of progress, refuses the narrative that says we are moving forward toward something better, and instead suggests that we might need to return, to recover what was lost, to imagine differently, to change the fundamental assumptions that organize our world. And so the question becomes not how to eliminate interruption—which is impossible, which would require you to stop living—but rather how to develop a practice that can absorb the disruptions of living, how to structure your work so that it can accommodate the inevitable gaps and silences that living produces, and this is what the novel models: writing continues what living interrupts not by transcending life but by incorporating it, by making interruption itself part of the form, building a novel that could only exist because it was interrupted, because living kept forcing the work to change.
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In this novel I wanted to create three novellas that are somehow linked, in order to differentiate its structure from those Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog and Sa Kasunod ng 909—but I should say here that while Teorya ng Unang Panahon is the third novel of a trilogy, the three books are actually standalone works, each can be read independently without knowledge of the others, each has its own integrity and completeness, and while reading the three successively will certainly provide a different kind of reading experience, will reveal connections and patterns that might not be visible when reading them in isolation, the same could be said of any three novels we choose to read together, any three texts we decide to put in conversation with each other, because the human mind seeks patterns and connections, wants to make meaning from disparate materials, and the trilogy I have written is less a rigid architecture that demands sequential reading than an invitation to see how three separate investigations into falling and numbers and time might speak to each other if you let them, how three different formal approaches might reveal something about the possibilities of the Filipino novel, but this invitation is not a requirement, which is itself a statement about the necessity of writing each thing fully and completely rather than making it dependent on what came before or what might come after, about trusting that wholeness and connection are not mutually exclusive, that a work can be both complete in itself and part of something larger.
The latest edition of 'Teorya ng Unang Panahon' by Ateneo University Press (2025), with cover design by Kiko Moran.
Ateneo University Press / Kiko Moran
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The title itself—Teorya ng Unang Panahon—points toward what continuation requires, because it invokes the mythological time before time, the primordial moment when things have not yet settled into fixed form, when everything remains possibility rather than actuality, and Filipino mythology is full of these origin stories, these tales of how things began, how the first pineapple appeared or how the first man and woman were created or how islands emerged from the sea, and what these stories share is that creation happens through loss, through sacrifice, through something being taken away so that something else can exist, and continuing to write means repeatedly returning to this primordial state, this unang panahon where the work is not yet what it will become, where you must sacrifice the version you thought you had finished in order to discover what it still needs to be, and this return is not regression but rather the condition of transformation, the willingness to unmake what you have made so that you can make it again differently, and each time you return to the manuscript after months or years away, you are returning to this originary moment, this space before certainty, where you must once again face the uncertainty of not knowing whether what you are making is any good, whether it will cohere, whether it matters.
The novel embodies this principle through its willingness to add Rosario Liwanag in later versions, a fictional Filipino novelist from the 1940s who wrote unfinished futuristic novels about people mutating to have plant-like characteristics to survive climate change, who lived with a woman composer named Leticia Gamboa in a bungalow near Laguna de Bay, whose famous origin story was that at age twenty, watching a magic show at a carnival where a man disappeared from a box, she suddenly thought with complete certainty: “I think I can write a novel,” and then did, and this disappearance might have been Antonio, the magician father of Norman who vanished during a performance in 1954 in Sa Kasunod ng 909 and reappeared years later confused about where he had been, suggesting that Rosario witnessed the very moment that tore Norman’s family apart, that the loss that initiated her writing was someone else’s catastrophe, that creation and destruction are always entangled, becoming one of the first Filipinas with a PhD in Biology though she devoted herself to fiction rather than scientific research, and her presence in the published version creates a genealogy for Yannis’s own speculative imagination, a model of someone who lived according to her desires and wrote unfinished work that still mattered, that Mike now teaches to his students, that Yannis reads while trying to understand what his own “Teorya” has unleashed, and adding her meant recognizing that the novel needed this ancestor, this queer Filipino woman scientist-writer who embodied the courage to begin with certainty even when no one was asking for her futuristic novels, whose origin was tied to another character’s disappearance in the previous novel of the trilogy, creating threads that connect across the three books even as each remains complete in itself. And the novel’s ending—or rather, its refusal to end—enacts this same principle, does not resolve the tension between continuing and stopping, does not offer a clear answer about whether writing is justified or whether it would be better to stop, and this refusal of resolution is itself a formal choice, because Teorya ng Unang Panahon does not end so much as stop, does not conclude so much as open into further questions, does not tie up its loose ends but rather multiplies them, leaves readers in a state of uncertainty about what happened and what it means and what comes next, and this ending—or non-ending—is frustrating for readers who want closure, who want to know definitively what the novel is saying, who want the comfort of resolution, but it is also the only ending that makes sense for a novel about what happens when you refuse to stop writing, because it means refusing the finality of conclusion, means insisting that the story continues even after the book closes, even after you stop reading, even after the author stops writing, and the novel’s structure enacts this refusal, suggests that the three narrative strands continue beyond the pages we are given, that Yannis and X-XIII and the letter-writer (writing to Hans, or to himself, or to no one) all continue existing in some space beyond the text, and this suggestion is not mystical or metaphysical but rather a recognition of how fiction actually works, how characters continue living in readers’ imaginations long after they finish the book, how stories keep generating new meanings and interpretations across time, how nothing is ever truly finished as long as people keep reading and thinking and responding.
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This refusal to stop is what I offer as the essay’s final thought, what I hope beginning writers carry: that it is not glamorous, not heroic, not the stuff of romantic myths about artistic genius, but rather patient, stubborn, often tedious work of returning again and again to material that resists you, of maintaining commitment across years when commitment would be easier to abandon, of trusting that accumulation matters even when you cannot see what is accumulating, of believing that the practice of returning is the point, that staying with the difficulty is the achievement, that refusing to stop is already the work itself, already the practice, already enough.
Edgar Calabia Samar is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Filipino at Ateneo de Manila University. He is the author of the award-winning Janus Silang series and has received multiple Palanca Awards, National Book Awards, and the S.E.A. Write Award from the Royal Family of Thailand (2024). He served as Visiting Professor at Osaka University (2017-2022) and Writer in Residence at the University of Iowa (2010). He is Vice Head of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and a member of the Filipino Critics Circle, LIRA, and Filipinas Institute of Translation. Ateneo Press is also releasing a new edition of his novel Teorya ng Unang Panahon this year.
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