I’ve met hundreds of young and aspiring writers in my lifetime, some of whom – though clearly talented – have professed to write only for themselves, without any thought or hope of reaching out to thousands, if not millions, of potential readers. I can respect that stance – but I have a hard time buying it. A person who joins a writing program or writers’ workshop then claims "I’m writing just for me" should have stayed in the kitchen or bathroom and written there – producing possibly wonderful poems, stories or essays – without having to waste other people’s time.
It’s more reasonable to assume that writers write to be read. And few writers get to be read by others more than newspaper or magazine columnists, for whom one day’s readership could well exceed a novelist’s (well, a Filipino novelist’s, anyway) yearly take. And profess as we might that we don’t really care about the figures when we write, I can’t imagine a writer who wouldn’t be gratified by the thought of being read by the equivalent of a small city.
I’ve often observed that we Pinoys think of writers as the coolest people, and of becoming a writer as the dream to nurture – all of this without reading much beyond comic books and newspapers. (Fair enough. Books are expensive, but words are cheap, and everybody has a few to spare.) We may not buy their books, but we think of writers as accomplished persons worthy of bringing out the marching band for, like my townmates did the last time I went home to speak at the high school graduation.
I remember growing up writing for the school paper – and being introduced by my proud folks to unwitting relatives and townmates as "the writer," eliciting oohs and ahs long enough to lace my shoes with. It got to the point that I came to believe what people were saying, and fancied myself a writer, whatever that meant in high school (among others, conspicuously toting a copy of Catcher in the Rye or The Little Prince and mouthing barely intelligible pronouncements vaguely resembling philosophy). I wrote a column for the high school and later the college paper, and while it was always a treat to see my name beneath a news or feature headline, it was especially thrilling to see my picture go with my opinions – whatever they were worth – and I was hooked for life.
We usually think of writing for the op-ed page as the acme of column writing, and that could be true up to a point. Op-ed writing requires not only a tenacious interest in current events – especially political and economic issues – but also strong, if not always well-reasoned, views. On the plus side, your subject is given to you – just check the headlines; on the other hand, you tend to settle into your well-considered opinions, rephrasing and rehashing them day after day, drawing on the loyalty of similarly inclined readers.
As a younger, professional journalist, I never wrote an op-ed column (I do now – an occasional piece for the newsmagazine Newsbreak and a weekly column for the San Francisco-based Filipinas magazine), but I wrote editorials three or four times a week for almost five years for another daily newspaper. It gave me a high like no other, since I could pontificate on anything from famines in Africa to film-festival cheating, but – as editorial writers quickly discover – there is such an ailment as God-fatigue, culminating in the sudden and crushing realization that one could very well be, or is, a pompous fraud, protected only by the anonymity of the editorial itself. It got so that I asked to be given a column in the lifestyle section, just to decompress and remind myself that I could be, well, myself. I gleefully wrote that column pro bono, and where editorializing was work, the column was unmitigated, soul-saving fun.
And then, of course – as our new columnists will find out for themselves – work can be fun, but fun can also be a lot of work. Lifestyle writing at its best (and I’m saying this as a reader, not a writer) is much more than telling people about the trendiest skirt lengths or the best spas or the prettiest debutantes, as intrinsically interesting as they may be. Sometimes it’s about making a connection between fantasy and reality, making ordinary people feel privy to things beyond themselves without degrading their sense of self-worth; at other times it’s about reintroducing people to themselves, celebrating the familiar without sounding trite. Great lifestyle writing survives the trends or fashions it may seem to be concerned with, transforming the ephemeral into the memorable, even as the American columnist Jim Watkins reminds us that "Writing a weekly column isn’t exactly like creating something that high school students will be required to read 100 years from now." Watkins adds that "It is, however, a challenge coming up with a fresh, insightful essay every seven days – or at least some ink spots to fill 10 inches of column space."
I can swear to the truth of that statement. The younger, brasher me boasted that he could write something about anything at the drop of a hat, that there was nothing he couldn’t find something to say about in 10 minutes. When I moved from the op-ed to the lifestyle section I reveled in the privilege and the opportunity to write about practically anything I wanted – until I realized that absolute freedom, like anything that sounds too good, was also an enormous burden.
Believe me: it’s a pain thinking of something interesting and substantial to write about week after week, and I don’t always hit the mark. (I keep a folder on my computer desktop titled "Column Ideas" where I stash snippets of topics, observations, and vignettes, but I also jot quick notes on my smartphone and on a real notebook, a happily battered Moleskine. In a fix, the back of a calling card will do.) Many of us get by through the simple and shameless expedient of cannibalizing our own lives – trying, at the same time, not to sound too self-absorbed and therefore irrelevant to the reader out there. If you think I’m making column writing look like a form of literary exhibitionism, you’d be absolutely right. I can’t think of a writing job that takes bigger chunks out of your personal life than a weekly lifestyle column – but then again, in another sense, the writing is or becomes the life.
If you’re a budding columnist, there’s a lot of good and free advice you can get on the Internet about column writing. (To cite just two, check out <http://www.oonyeoh.squarespace.com/column-writing-tips/> and <http://watkins.gospelcom.net/manu.htm>. If you go to my blog below, these will be live links.)
I’d sum up my own counsel to columnists thus:
1. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You and your experiences are interesting and important only insofar as they strike a responsive chord in the imaginations of ordinary people.
2. Keep a journal or, better yet, a blog. It’s a form of finger exercise, a way of moving from random jottings to a full-fledged essay (which, in effect, a column is). Blogs reach far more people than even newspapers, and provide a free and handy means of archiving your work – and of soliciting reader responses.
3. Be prepared for violently hostile reactions. There will always be that reader who will hate your guts for whatever reason, or who will deliberately misread your points to make one of his or her own. I’ve gotten hate mail for everything from Iraq to Faulkner to The Da Vinci Code. (I’m advising you to be cool, but I have to admit to a short temper – if someone writes me a particularly nasty message I tend to send it right back across the net with a forehand volley.)
4. Thank your lucky stars for every reader who reads you, hostile or not. I have a pet theory that the reader to write for is the one most unlike you; your clones will be pushovers for anything you say, but it’s that truly different, difficult, diffident reader who’ll test your powers of persuasion.
5. In the same vein, practice your column-writing mind on the unfamiliar topic. Even as you’ll inevitably gravitate towards certain favorites, no subject should be beneath you or beyond you. In the art of the informal essay, it isn’t really the topic that counts, but your treatment of it – which will tell the reader if it’s worth buying next week’s issue, just to see what you’re up to. Sure, it’s a tall order – but that’s exactly why not everyone gets to be where you are, in this space, at this time.
So welcome and good luck to all of my new colleagues here at the STAR, and may your inkwells never go dry.
I wrote about this new literary journal – a refereed journal which will take only the best original, unpublished work and pay top rates for accepted pieces – a couple of weeks ago. We’re accepting submissions at likhaanjournal@gmail.com, and I’m hoping that we’ll get our inaugural issue out in time for Writers’ Night early in December. Please visit my blog (see the URL below) for more details.
Many thanks again to UP Diliman Chancellor Gerry Cao for helping us see this project through. He’s a mathematician by training and otherwise a professor of business administration, so his support for the arts is doubly appreciated.