I walked into the old CCJE Building at Palawan State University for this year’s Regional Higher Education Press Conference expecting to judge quietly, tally scores, and play the dignified “veteran.”
Instead, I found myself staring at a room full of Opinion and Editorial writers, the supposed sharpest teeth in campus journalism, who looked like they were waiting for a Sunday school lesson on how to be “objective.”
I was told weeks earlier that my job was simple — sit down, grade the pieces, keep the smile polite and the comments measured. But I forgot the script. “I don’t play by the book,” I began, and I could see their reactions, some looked confused, some yearning, some grinning.
If they were expecting a sermon about balance, about “on the one hand, but on the other hand,” about how to offend absolutely no one while saying absolutely nothing, they picked the wrong judge.
The book so many young writers cling to was written for a world that no longer exists. Trying to survive the future with laminated rules from the past is how you become irrelevant. They looked confused. Good. Confusion is honest. They were waiting for a formula. Thesis, antithesis, conclusion, neutral tone, do not upset anyone important. Etc.. a clean little cage disguised as discipline.
Opinion writing is not a recitation. It is not a polite reaction paper. It is a position. And positions require a spine.
I told them to master what I call the IDGAF mentality. Not recklessness. Not sloppiness. Not publishing half-baked rage and calling it bravery. I mean refusing to be emotionally hostage to applause. If your writing depends on being liked, you are compromised before you even hit publish. Campus journalism often trains students to survive panels, to sound fair, to avoid trouble. It rarely trains them to matter. Balance without conviction is aesthetic cowardice.
I wanted to ask, who are you afraid of offending? Administration, sponsors, classmates, family members, future employers Googling their names? You cannot build a voice while whispering. The future of this profession does not belong to the safest writer in the room. It belongs to the clearest one. Clear. Researched. Armed. Precision is power. The future belongs to the one who stands on their business.
Before you demand freedom in tone, earn authority in research. Read more than your peers. Know the policies. Study the numbers. Understand the history. When you speak, speak from a position fortified by facts. Then write something that cannot be ignored. Not sloppy. Not hysterical. Not performative. Unavoidable.
We’re all hungry for the ‘big games,’ but none of us want to do the dishes. Everyone wants the national bylines, the prestige, and the badges, as if it were that simple. It’s not. The grind is unavoidable. The refining is inevitable. I spent six years in the trenches before Rappler even noticed I existed and asked me to be their correspondent.
It wasn’t an overnight sensation. I was a provincial ghost. I spent years writing in the margins, without a Journalism background, perfecting and harnessing my craft in small publications where sometimes I think nobody was even looking, and refining a voice that most people found “too much.”
From the mud-caked mountain trails of the south to the most isolated island frontiers of this province, I’ve chased leads from the forgotten corners of Mangsee to the wind-whipped shores of Pag-asa Island. I spent those years documenting lives the ‘general public’ usually ignores. Through storm or drought, I was there. I’ve been stranded for days in the West Philippine Sea, reeling from seasickness and cut off from the world by a dead cell signal, all while Chinese militia vessels swarmed our position like sharks in the gray mist. That wasn’t a goddamned field trip.
Those long, dusty miles and restless tides were my real anchor. They taught me that if you can’t respect the story of a fisherman in a remote barangay or a tribal leader in Rizal, you have no right to tell the story of a nation. I didn’t learn this craft in an air-conditioned classroom; I learned it in the trenches. So, whoever tells me I don’t know ‘ball’ is clearly mistaken because I know exactly how to f/cking ball.
But above that, I was also eager to learn from the bottom. To listen to my editors. To keep notes. To invest time in asking uncomfortable questions. I showed up even when I felt behind, intimidated, scared, and like an outcast.
Throughout the years, I realized that you don’t get invited to the big table by being a polite guest; you get invited because you’ve become so loud and so right that they can’t afford to leave you outside.
I told them I stopped selling ice cream years ago. When you start out, you want everyone to like the flavor of your prose. You want to be the safe writer, the agreeable columnist whose words are clipped and posted because they offend no one. Pleasant. Pleasant is just another word for invisible.
A good column is not dessert; it is a surgical strike. It exists to collect a reaction, not a compliment. There are only two reactions that matter: good and bad. Personally, I prefer the bad. If you are nodding along with me, you are not learning anything; you are looking for a mirror. If a piece makes you uncomfortable, even angry, at least it has broken through the noise of indifference. For me it means I have gotten my way in your head and now I’m occupying a space without paying a single dime for rent.
One Game of Thrones scene that still haunts me is when Tyrion Lannister explains to Jon Snow why he reads so much, delivering one of his most iconic lines:
“My mind is my weapon. My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
I mean, how do you think Tyrion survived until the end? He mastered the art of being indispensable. While the high-born lords were busy sharpening their steel, Tyrion was sharpening his wits. He survived because he understood a fundamental truth about Westeros: if you aren’t a warrior and you aren’t a king, you have to be the person the kings can’t afford to kill.
My point is, none of this works without foundation.
The first step to good writing is reading. It is not optional. You cannot be a professional writer without first being an active, participatory reader. Read good works. Read bad works. Read literary giants. Read tabloids and magazines. Dang, I even watch all sorts of documentaries. Fill your head with written words, with data, with knowledge.
Think of writing as Lego. If you only have square blocks, you can only build square things. The more shapes you collect, the more complex your structures become. Your words are your blocks. Your sentence structures, phrases, metaphors are assembled from what you have absorbed. Nothing is purely original; you synthesize, combine, rearrange. You stop mimicking and start constructing.
No master arrives without training.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that mastery requires roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, about five years of 40-hour weeks. Even then, you become the best version of your own potential, not a replica of a genius. You can practice piano relentlessly and never become Mozart; you simply become the best pianist you are capable of being.
Writing is no different. Some train informally through blogs, competitions, workshops, journals. Others pursue formal degrees in journalism, creative writing, or English. Structure or independence matters less than commitment. Time matters. Discipline matters.
And then there is failure. Rejections. Unanswered pitches. Manuscripts returned with silence. Each setback teaches you what to do and what not to do. Winning is fleeting; learning endures. Sometimes the hardest part of being a writer is not the writing itself but the promoting and the connecting, the showing up long after the applause fades.
So, to those young writers in that old building, and to anyone who wants to pursue this craft seriously: read everything, across genres, while you still have the time. Keep a journal or a personal blog. Show up every day, even if it is only a few hundred words. Detach your ego from reaction. Anchor yourself in research. Decide whether you want applause or impact.
As my lecture came to an end, I left those young writers with the 24-hour rule. When you publish something bold, you do not chase it. If it flops, let it flop. Do not resuscitate it with desperation. Not every piece will soar; some will land with a dull thud. That is not death, it is data. Learn and move on. If it goes viral, savor the victory, but only for 24 hours. Enjoy the surge. Screenshot the shares. Feel the adrenaline. Then, on the 25th hour, get back to work.
Do not live off a single hit. This is how you build your own brand. Your brand isn’t what you wrote yesterday. Your brand is the fact that you’re going to write again tomorrow, and it’s going to be just as unapologetic as the last.
Do not become a nostalgia act for your own success. A writer who clings to yesterday’s applause begins writing merely to preserve it. A predator writer hunts again. Be the hunter; refuse to be the prey. Momentum favors the disciplined, not the distracted. Whether the piece crashes or explodes, your job is the same: sharpen your teeth and write the next one.
The ice cream vendor is dead. I killed that version of myself years ago. The question now isn’t whether people like what I write, but whether they can afford to skip it.
