How To Be A Column Writer

For the 16 years I worked in newspaper journalism in addition to reporting, editing, writing editorials, and managing staff, I wrote a column at least once a week. I've been revisiting some of the columns and thought I'd share some of them here.

– Never lie. In print.– It's okay not to know what you're writing about as long as you don't know about it in an interesting way.– The longer the column, the greater the number of important sentences it must contain, and not only do column writers not have a great number of important sentences in their heads, readers can't deal with too many of them anyway.– The hardest thing to attain in a column is your own individual voice: try to force it and it cracks; fail to search for it in every sentence and it disappears.– Truth, that bastard child of reality and perception, shines brightest unadorned.– When all else fails, do satire, and then repent.– Political columnists have it easy, they only have to write with their heads. But when intellect takes over prose, prose loses is poetry.– Comic columnists are fun to read, but comedy reaches truth only through the door of dark cynicism.– The sources of inspiration are too fragile to explain; leave them alone.– Love thy neighbor for his foibles; they give you something to write about.– Gather criticism and compliments in the same crucible of skepticism.– A column that disturbs no one has no mark to hit; a column that disturbs everyone has missed the mark.– Learn the columnist's prayer: "God, grant me the courage to complain about that which I cannot change."– Learn the columnist's confession: "God, forgive me for complaining so much."– Learn to write aphorisms; they'll get you through another day.