Writing in style
AA Patawaran
n his first best-selling book, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Style Dictator (2012), writer, speaker, teacher, and Manila Bulletin Lifestyle editor AA Patawaran yanks readers from their growing obsession with one- to five- worded status updates and into the world of long-form writing.
From his time as a young editor of a glossy society magazine to helming several other publications including The Manila Bulletin’s Sense&Style magazine where he was editor-in-chief for eight years, Patawaran chronicles a fascinating writer’s journey while sharing profound writing tips from grammar to cadence, from conquering the dreaded blank page to killing your darlings.
Rarely is writing humanized, romanticized, even. In his attempt to find relevance for the written word in the digital age, at a time he thought and felt he had reached “the end of his string,” Patawaran inspires readers, young and old, to write, and write well.
In 2015, a year after taking the helm of Manila Bulletin Lifestyle, he began to explore the world of poetry and started expressing his thoughts and commentaries in the form of haikus, metrics, rhythmic patterns, and free verse.
This poetic exploration led to a collaboration with good friend artist Love Marie Ongpauco-Escudero a.k.a. Heart Evangelista in Hainaku, a collection of poetry inspired by life’s most engrossing themes—love and pain, solitude and reflection, arrivals and departures, new beginnings and the apocalypse.
Patawaran, in another feat of writing ingenuity, published a collection of poems at a time when people, even those in the book industry, thought poems are nondescript, impractical, and unsalable. When in fact, taking a moment to sit down, enjoy a cup of coffee, and lose oneself in poetry is a quiet luxury that is at once comforting and thought-provoking.
As Lifestyle editor, Patawaran continues to mandate the importance of advocating stories and experiences, text or visual, in his commitment to encourage readers to keep reading and writing. He is a firm believer of lifestyle journalism as coalesce of journalism and creative writing. He douses fact with fiction and grounds fiction with facts.