Lisa Robertson and the Myth of Originality

By Noel Galon de Leon

Every now and then, we encounter a writer who unsettles everything we thought we knew about writing — not because she introduces a revolutionary technique or an entirely new formula, but because she reminds us of the simple truths we have long forgotten. This was my experience while reading Lisa Robertson’s interview, “An Interview with Lisa Robertson,” published in Asymptote Journal. As I moved through each of her responses, I realized that it was more than an interview about her novel Riverwork. It was, in many ways, a masterclass on why we write, how we write, and, perhaps more importantly, how we should teach writing. As a creative writing teacher, I could not help but think of my students. How many times have we taught them to build a plot, find the climax, introduce conflict, and resolve the ending? But how often have we taught them to listen first to their own voice?

One of Robertson’s ideas that stayed with me was her admission that she does not begin writing with a plot. She begins with tone. It is a remarkably simple statement, yet its implications are profound. For many years, we have been conditioned to believe that the most important question in writing is, What is the story? But what if the better question is, What is the voice of this story? Two writers may tell the same story, but it is their voice that reveals who they are. Tone allows us to recognize the speaker long before we fully understand what is being said. Perhaps this is the reminder our creative writing classrooms desperately need. We spend so much time teaching structure that we sometimes forget to nurture voice.

I was equally struck by the way Robertson describes Riverwork as a search for a river long buried beneath the streets of Paris. Yet the novel is not merely about a river. It is about forgotten histories, erased women, invisible labor, and neglected poetry. That was when I realized that this is, perhaps, what every great writer ultimately does. A writer does not simply invent stories. A writer excavates memory. They dig through experiences that society has buried beneath the weight of time. In an age when so many aspire to write about the extraordinary, perhaps we need to remind our students that the ordinary is already extraordinary if only we learn to look closely enough. Sometimes, the most important stories are hidden in an old notebook that belonged to a grandmother, in the name of a river that has disappeared from the map, or in a word that is slowly fading from our own language.

As teachers, we often encourage our students to be original. Yet while reading Robertson, I found myself wondering whether we have been emphasizing the wrong word all along. Originality is often overrated. What truly matters is attention. A great writer is not always the one with the most unusual idea. More often, it is the one who observes differently. A writer notices what everyone else overlooks. They find poetry between two ordinary sentences, history behind the walls of an old building, and emotion within the silence of a scene. In the end, writing is not a competition to possess the grandest imagination. It is an exercise in seeing.

I was also deeply moved by Robertson’s reflections on form. She does not regard it as a fixed mold to which every work must conform. For her, form flows. It moves like water, changing according to what the work itself requires. As creative writing teachers, this is something we need to remind ourselves of again and again. The techniques we teach should serve as maps, not prisons. We cannot force every story into the same structure because every story breathes differently. Every narrative discovers its own architecture. Our role as teachers is not to dictate the “correct” shape of a story, but to help our students discover the form their work is asking for.

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the interview is Robertson’s reflection on reading. She does not describe it as the simple acquisition of information. Reading, for her, is intimacy. It is an encounter with another person’s mind across time, language, and culture. This reminder feels especially urgent today, in an age of AI-generated summaries, quick reviews, and endless scrolling. Many people read merely to finish a book. Writers, however, read to hear how a sentence breathes. They read for rhythm. They read for silence. They read not simply to know, but to become.

There is another remark by Robertson that has continued to linger in my mind: “The novel tells about time. Poetry is time.” It is more than an elegant quotation. It is a reminder that literature does not merely tell stories about life; it creates an experience of living. The next time we read our students’ work, perhaps it will not be enough to ask whether the plot is clear or the structure is coherent. More important questions might be these: How did I experience the passage of time while reading this piece? Did the world seem to slow down? Did my heartbeat quicken? Did I become aware of the silence between the words? These are questions we rarely ask in creative writing workshops, yet perhaps they deserve a place in our critical vocabulary.

Another of the interview’s most valuable lessons lies in Robertson’s writing process. She does not wait for inspiration before she begins. Nor does she rush to finish a novel. Instead, she gathers fragments over many years — notes, sentences, dreams, history, philosophy, and observations. Gradually, they begin to speak to one another until the work takes shape. This is an invaluable reminder for our students, who are often discouraged when their first draft does not immediately seem “good enough.” We need to tell them more often that first drafts are not meant to be masterpieces. They are meant to be beginnings. Writing is not a sprint. It is slow work. It demands patience, revision, humility, and trust.

Perhaps this is the most important lesson I carried away from Lisa Robertson’s interview. Creative writing is not merely about producing stories. It is about cultivating a way of seeing the world. As teachers, we do more than teach metaphor, characterization, or point of view. We teach our students to become attentive observers, thoughtful critics, and compassionate witnesses to the lives of others. The true writer is not the one who writes the fastest or accumulates the longest list of publications. The true writer is the one who continues to listen — to language, to history, to silence, and to the countless voices buried beneath the surface of everyday life.

When I closed the interview in Asymptote Journal, I felt that I had experienced far more than a conversation with a novelist. I left with a reminder: Before we ask our students to find a story, we must first encourage them to find a voice. Before we demand originality, we should teach attention. Before we celebrate publication, we should celebrate patience. And before we ask what a work of literature is trying to say, perhaps we should first ask whether we still know how to listen. In the end, writing is not simply about putting words on the page. It is about learning to hear the quiet river that continues to flow beneath them.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts–National Committee on Literary Arts.