There I was, arrogant as young writers usually are, when Nick Joaquin burst the over-inflated shiny red balloon that was my head with a few, well-chosen words: "There are no hack-writing jobs, there are only hack writers."

A year ago, I was a college sophomore at a turning point in my life, thinking of shifting to Creative Writing or Journalism after I emerged with top grades in the creative writing classes I was taking in school. At that time, I was also starting to get published regularly in a major daily's youth section, along with other magazines, as well. Flushed with the first taste of success, I decided to pick Journalism, thinking that since I was doing well in Creative Writing, I could do the same in Journalism-after all, it was a writing course too. But after a semester of mediocre news drafts, I began doing what most normal students would do after getting failing marks: I complained.

"These people in Journ are such dull, boring writers! I suppose typing straight news reports every day zaps the creative energy out of them, hah," I would say, shaking my head at the examples of journalism the professors showed us in class. "In creative writing, writers find different ways to say things-we create worlds for the readers as opposed to simply reporting the events!"

This went on for quite some time, until I went home despondent after receiving barely - passing marks for News Writing. For someone who writes for a newspaper, this was a little more than embarrassing. In an attempt to soothe my singed ego, I reached for a creative nonfiction textbook-a genre I took refuge in-and turned to the day's assigned readings for my Comparative Literature class. Among the assigned was a transcript of Nick Joaquin's acceptance speech for the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay award in Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts. It was entitled, "Journalism versus Literature."

The words jumped out like boiling oil from a frying pan, and stung just as much. "Eccentricity," Mang Nick said, "is such a temptation to the creative writer because he tends to be self-indulgent. In the Philippines especially, where so few read him, he may be tempted to indulge his fancies and foibles. He feels under no obligation to communicate clearly because he knows that his readers are mostly his own fellow writers and that he can play games with them."

He went on, "The so-called creative writer tends to be too subjective, too obsessed with himself. That's why I think every aspiring young writer should spend some years as a news reporter, so he will be obliged to step out of his own private world and to experience the world outside." I considered his words. It was true that I enjoyed my creative writing classes because I was assessed by fellow writers, who could appreciate the pretended subtleties and witticisms of my work. We all had fun in class, and we were all so proud of ourselves for being clever and fabulous and intellectual-and, we perfectly understood each other's work. But what about the readers of the daily which I also wrote for? Did they understand what I was saying too, or was I coming across as just another self-absorbed, pompous wannabe who was lucky enough to get published? Was it my failure as a writer?

Worried, I compiled all my work. On one pile sat the "hard news," mostly the stuff that I wrote for journalism classes, and on the other, the pieces I wrote for my literary classes. Stacked in the middle of both piles were my published articles in the magazines and newspaper. I went through the articles one by one. Some I read over and over, proud for having written relevant and interesting features, while I quickly put down a few others upon reading the first few paragraphs. Not too bad for a beginner, I thought, but was that it? Was I going to move on and continue with my hit-or-miss writing style until I got better?

Yes, the carefree college student in me thought. Hey, no one ever said that epiphanies were easy to come by. So I went on writing my articles, getting good feedback on some, disappointing my high school teachers (who followed the progress of my work) with others, didn't really care at first-I was, after all, writing for the lifestyle section, not the front page. I enjoyed going to events and meeting people. The champagne-bubble life was exciting-and best of all, I didn't have to exert much effort to write about it. The articles I wrote at that time sounded like press releases, but I didn't notice because I was having so much fun.

Then one morning, I went down to read the papers and turned to the entertainment pages, where I was besieged with a battalion of badly written showbiz articles. I read about Kris Aquino's latest beau, the contents of some starlet's closet, and Sharon Cuneta's weight gain update. How supremely baduy, I thought with a smirk. I wondered why anyone would want for the entertainment section when everything in it was always so tacky. Then there he was again, Nick Joaquin on my brain, admonishing writers to respect their subjects. A young poet, he said, was scandalized because he once wrote about Nora Aunor, therefore making him a bakya writer-"But that article lives as one of the best essays on Miss Aunor because she was not bakya to me and I did not go bakya on her," he said. "Every report," he went on, "must be done as if you were reporting on the parting of the Red Sea, or the Battle of Pinaglabanan, or the splitting of the atom." I surrendered. Who was I to argue with Nick Joaquin? And what was I doing, forcing half-baked and halfhearted articles on the poor readers? From then on, I took Mang Nick's words to heart-while I'm certainly no Great Filipino Writer, at least I'm no longer writing simply for myself (or for other writers, for that matter), not writing selfishly. I still write about fashion, beauty, the latest UAAP players and other such topics, but I try not to trivialize anything. There are still some difficulties, but at least I no longer roll my eyes while I write because I try to respect all my subjects to the best of my ability. And that change of attitude did more for me more than all the writing workshops I had joined.

Not surprisingly, the change of heart improved even my dismal Journalism grades-I was no longer determined to manipulate news writing to my style; I discovered that news reporting wasn't so bad once I gave my subjects the respect they deserved (no more "Don't the masses have better things to do than hold up jeepneys? Now we have to go and interview the hoi polloi when we could be writing poems! Why do we have to report this, anyway?"). And somehow, even my creative writing improved because I was less self-focused.

In his long and varied career, Nick Joaquin managed to reconcile the rivalry between literature and journalism by performing admirably in both fields, giving each side a chance to look up and respect the other. He merged the principles of journalism and creative writing in a sentence: "Good reportage is telling it as it is but at the same time telling it new, telling it surprising, telling it significant."

Nick Joaquin taught many young writers a lot of important things, tips on good writing, etc-although I never had the chance to meet him before he passed away, I will always have him to thank for teaching me how to respect my subjects, and that literature and journalism can go hand in hand. This is something that I hopefully can pass on, from Nick Joaquin to me, to generations of writers who want to make a difference in literature and mass media today and in the future. And change has never been needed so much as it is today, especially in mass communications-and maybe, just maybe, with Mang Nick's help, I can make a difference.

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