Butch Dalisay, a UP creative writing professor, once offered reasons in his column in the Philippine Star why Filipinos don't write that many novels. My conclusion is that it doesn't take a PhD (maybe an MD hehehe) to answer why.
Here's my take (I actually commented on his blog). The reason why the contemporary Filipino novel is either in constant turnaround or kindof lurks in the shadow of say, a Rizal novel, is that most Filipino novelists today fit only a narrow stereotype of someone who's part of the academe, someone writing for writing's sake.
Reading an F. Sionel Jose feels as if it's required reading in Lit 101. It's so Lit 101. There's always a sense of believing that the Filipino novel is always a literary novel comparable to those published by Penguin, a highbrowed concept.
It is worsened by the fact that a novel as a literary form is, by definition, long -- in fact, universally too long for everyone's attention span, not just the Pinoy's attention span. A novel can only be successful if it connects to a larger audience. And we are talking here about that small audience of English-reading Filipinos.
Then it gets worse: English novel readers are only a tiny subset of English-reading Pinoys, too small to support the concept of a Filipino novel. Then here's the worst: The average English novel reader who is Pinoy, like most English novel readers around the world, will only buy a novel that's cool, a novel with cool characters, a novel that's well researched. In that sense, writing a novel requires more than just laziness masquerading as what the UP professor called "a largeness of vison" -- more than just being holed up in a mountain resort. It's more about research, a clinical feel of what's going on, a conversation here and there, and an ear for the nuanced idioms of the internet-savvy novel reader. That is, if you agree with me that the novel is more than just a literary Penguin-type novel.
What fits the literate Pinoy's idea of a novel is the American Novel. It ranges from, more or less, a Tom Clancy, a Neil Gaiman, a Don deLillo, and the da Vinci Code to the Notebook and the chic lit types, among others. There is one pattern in the great American novel: It is well researched (keyword: well researched; say it again: well researched), and the process of writing it is essentially democraticized; meaning, it is not only written by academic types but by people who pursue other interests, those who really have stories to tell -- not contrived stories. When a scandalous White House intern will write a novel, that novel could be interesting.
So why read a Pinoy novel when you have something that's more interesting? I don't want an F. Sionel Jose that will most likely lie around the house and gather dust like A Brief History of Our Time.
But our CURSE is that, in the first place, we just happen to enjoy the English language. And then, it also happens that the American novel is well researched and is written in -- English.* It's a curse that our Pinoy novelists will have to contend with (it's maybe related to colonial mentality but that's another story; the Greeks and the Scandinavians suffer from the same malady -- they prefer to write in English). But more than anything else, we are stuck with the old, un-diversified idea of the novel: the literary novel written by academic types. Now, don't force me to read those Tagalog or Bisaya or Hiligaynon novels. Ang hirap talaga basahin except yung mga mala-Sweet-Valley-High na tagalog.
*Thus, Pinoy writers are relegated to write short fiction and non-fiction. Ganun din ata ang nangyayari sa movie industry natin. Instead of competing head-on with Hollywood, they opted to find niches in soap operas, sitcoms, game shows, noon variety shows, etc. Latin America does the same with its soaps.
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