Book report: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, by Suzette Martinez Standring
The reviewing trade has a law that a critic doesn’t write up works created by friends. It’s a group of laws, actually. When a periodical’s staffer or regular contributor writes a book, the books editor will contract someone outside to critique it. And, a critic cannot fairly consider a book in which he’s quoted or has contributed to.
These are excellent rules, designed to provide objectivity to a deliberately subjective practice. I believe in all that, four-square. An exception follows.
If Suzette listed in the subtitle all the “others,” I’d be about 3,334th, for this is not the usual writing-instruction or -reference book. Those generally are written by an expert, who’ll credit a teacher or an influence but that’s about it. Suzette is an expert but knows that examples and guest speakers in class have a big impact. In her relatively short column-writing career she has figured out not only how to do good work but to explain it. In this book she recalls her own experiences — even printing an old column where she messed up — yet relies on the advice of others. This is not name dropping but organized quotes from people who’ve figured this out. That’s 3,333 of them, more of a guess than an estimate.
I’m quoted a couple of times because my master’s thesis was about newspaper columns and that led to co-writing with Suzette and others a revision of a booklet published by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
While your local Billions of Books in a Barn has shelves of books on writing only a very few have been published on columns. Suzette covers all the main categories of columns, their construction and idea generation, as well as blogs and journalism ethics 101.
Suzette didn’t just interview dozens of top columnists (and a few editors and syndication executives), but several people actually contributed sections: Huffington (who made the title list), Ray Hanania and Leonard Pitts Jr. are the more famous ones.
This book is a boon even for longtime journalists like me. Also, even though I was present at nearly all of the speeches and panel discussions Suzette refers to, I learned from this presentation. Her from-scratch views on ethics, reporting and structure of columns provide new angles and needed reminders of what we should be doing. I say from scratch because columning and journalism comprise a second career for the author. She sees so much with fresh eyes.
Mainly, The Art of Column Writing will be invaluable to budding columnists. It even notes possible pay (minimal) and the odds of getting published (tough, even for good ones) The book’s reader reviews in Amazon prove this. What journalists do, what the branch called columnists do, is by design transparent, but that can be confusing.
A story: In graduate school in 2002-2003, I took two parallel classes that couldn’t have been more different: Literature of Journalism, by University of Arkansas Journalism Chair Patsy Watkins, and Literary Non-fiction, taught by the noted writer Ellen Gilchrist. Patsy’s was a survey course with the likes of Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and the like, with papers including a New Journalism reporting project.
Ellen’s was a UA Creative Writing Program workshop, but with a long book list with folks like Joan Didion, so each student wrote about three truthful stories that semester, which were critiqued during class. Most comprised short memoir. One grad student, though, tried magazine-length journalism, an environmental topic. Here he was, a published writer (Admission to Creative Writing requires an existing track record; I snuck in by this being my minor), and while he attributed everything — no plagiarism — he broke every other reporting rule. Ellen let me try to explain multiple sourcing and skepticism of everything especially from the Internet. It was tough, and I don’t think he quite understood.
Suzette, unlike me in that frustrating critique, achieves this in her book. Columns with facts have to be absolutely certain. Commentary must be bolstered by reporting and ethical uses of rhetoric. Humor must be grounded. At just 200 pages, this is a how-to that explains how-to. -30-
