WHAT does it take to be a columnist, a weakness for words?
Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places. I poached from current events and embellished to suit my plot. I felt no shame in raiding the headlines, as it is necessary. I’ve been taught that when attempting contemporary satire, sharp-eyed humor relies on topical reference point.
The pressure is wicked. Sometimes, when it threatens my sanity, I wish I listened to my mother and did something practical by becoming a doctor, lawyer or a teacher.
Unlike the novelist, poet, or playwright; columnists are not performing center ring, and must be content in their self-imposed role of second-class citizens in the world of literati. In that undisciplined existence, a columnist is licensed to be cheeky by drawing to so many strands of inconsistencies in human behavior, by getting away with a fair amount of authority.
It is its personal intimacy, a chatter with pen in hand, in an urban conversational manner. The writer seems to speak directly into your ear, confiding, everything from wisdom to gossip in the usual seesaw of modesty and egotism; universality and touching eccentricity. It deals lightly and harmoniously (even struggling for honesty) with personal experiences, opinions, prejudices…all having to do with the varied aspects of life.
Others say column writing is the most profound work of the intellect in the face of life. In spite of this, it is notoriously flexible and adaptable. For prose to move anywhere, in all the directions, it is open to digression and the promiscuousness of the mind.
It is fragmentary and random, as the writer gives you her spontaneous thoughts and lets you know, in addition to how she gets to the point. Through the seashell soul of intimacy, candor and irony, taking a stand on just about everything — from tragedies (which ennobles a man) to comedies (which cuts a man down to his size) — even rich speculations about a man’s sexuality, morals or lack of it. She draws out parts through similes, metaphors, hyperboles, and exaggeration in fleshing out ideas. As it says, what is at issue and then stops where it feels itself complete, not where nothing is left to see.
What joy it is indeed to write without playing the pedantic schoolmaster, void of all learning crammed out of books. Just a decent person looking at you or me, or anyone else of what she thought about life with mock solemnity. You can take a stand on just about everything from political, to cultural, to personal life in a blend of reportage, getting away with what borders on autobiographical. You’d want to strangle that columnist who does his craft with glee.
Column writing represents a mode of living. It parts a way for the self to function with relative freshness in this uncertain world. It doesn’t make excessive claims or compulsive sprinkling citations to get a free ride or other men’s brain.
In a field where objectivity is a kin to the Holy Grail, newspaper columnists are free to express opinion. Unfettered by the need to be objective or fair, columnists can be scathing in their criticism, unabashed in their praise funny or poignant, arrogant or intensely personal.
Political columnist George Will said, what distinguishes a valuable columnist is “an ability to see what everybody sees, but not in quite the way that everybody sees it.”
And according to Virginia Wolfe, all columns are addressed to the common reader she has defined as “that somewhat fussy figure who may or may not exist but has been solicited and inviled to partake.”
And now gentle readers, how to give an old saw a new twist as I cobble a column.
***
E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
