A Column Too Far   

Writing these things is not as easy as it looks.

Yes, Rem, yes.... I know, Rem.... The column was due three hours ago. Just putting the finishing touches on it when you called. Yeah, yeah, it's going good. Have it in an hour, hour-and-a-half, max. Yes, I promise.

All right, Mr. So Smart, Mr. Opinionator, you finally did it--you stretched the deadline so far on this one that it looks like a rubber band in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Where are you gonna come up with 750 words at this late date?

Call the crown prince and have him pull a Mideast peace plan out of his desk drawer? Nice trick, but Friedman already did it. Maybe hunt down Slats Grobnik? Haven't heard much from him since Royko stopped filing. Crib from the latest George Carlin book? Um, might be a dicey career move.

Write about boogers and Spontaneously Exploding Underpants, which I think we all agree is an excellent name for a rock band--but Dave Barry might not appreciate it.

Word count: 167. Hmmm.... Better move on to the nut-graf stuff....

Writing a column is one of the toughest jobs in journalism. All the boys and girls in the newsroom think they can do it, and certainly do it better than the incumbents. But once you actually land a column gig, you immediately wonder what you were thinking.

It's not just the trifling difficulties of switching from objective to subjective point of view, or finding your voice, or figuring out if you really have anything to say. No, the flop sweat comes from the pressure. Columns are relentless; they are unforgiving. They stalk you like Freddy in those "Nightmare on Elm Street" movies.

Some columns are little more than glorified feature stories. There are columnists who really work the streets and columnists who don't expend the calories it takes to lift the phone. Some pontificate or scold. Others dwell on life's little mysteries. ("How does that darn dryer know which socks to eat?")

I've always thought the best columnists are extensions of their communities, be they geographical or virtual--Breslin in New York, Royko in Chicago, Anna Quindlen on her Boomer generation. The late, great Herb Caen was San Francisco, just as Carl Hiaasen stands for wacky South Florida. But those columnar connections are getting more tenuous, for a variety of complex reasons, not least being a sense on the part of many readers that the ink-stained warrior is no longer one of them. (Didn't I read something about that lately? Oh yeah--Howie in the Post, I could quote from that....) "[A]s journalists have become more firmly entrenched in the upper middle class--writing books, sending their kids to private school, moving from market to market--many readers have come to view them as out of touch with the community," Howard Kurtz wrote recently in the Washington Post.

Word count: 438. Sigh.

My own experience as a writer of columns is kind of weird--I've done a lot of them, but always as "add-ons" to my day job. Unfortunately, that means that as much as I enjoy the bully pulpit, I've seldom had the kind of time it takes to do columns right, which pretty much puts me in the Bloviator Class of the breed.

Still, it's experience enough to give me a profound respect for people who do columns well. Indeed, one of my heroes was a lovely man named Joe Aaron, who for some three decades wrote six columns a week--yes, you read that right, six columns a week--for the Evansville Courier in my Indiana hometown. Talk about pressure--Joe's typewriter never stopped smoking, and neither did Joe.

Every good columnist develops certain tricks, and in turning out his daily "Morning Assignment" one of Joe's was writing about his beloved THUDS, or The Hapless Underdogs. Who were THUDS? All of us--as I was the rueful day I dropped the keys to my locked car into a deep snow bank and a couple of farm boys extorted $20 to tow me back to civilization. Joe's readers called regularly to tell THUD stories on themselves, and Joe artfully turned each one into a little playlet on the human comedy.

And now he is up there somewhere, guiltlessly dragging on a cigarette, looking at me and grinning that knowing little grin of his. See, not so easy, is it? he would say. Hey, I would reply, I never said it was.

Word count: 696...hmmm. How to wrap this thing up gracefully? Maybe dig up a serious-sounding quote to make them think I was educated. Where's the Bartlett's? Flip to "Writing."... Let's see. Shakespeare, maybe? Nah, too pretentious. Keats? Yuck. Wait, here's my go-to guy Samuel Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

Word count: 749.

Perfect.