How to write a column

In gratitude to the 14 readers who voted me best local columnist recently, I thought I would help you understand the crucial minutiae involved in writing an award-winning newspaper column.

Give yourself plenty of time to plan what you are going to write about. This is key. At least two weeks before your editor’s deadline, map out a dozen possible topics, keeping in mind the state of the country, the economy, the power lines in planning stages and the Golden Globe winners.

Return to this list often, adding and subtracting ideas as topics drift in and out of the collective consciousness. Try not to include your family on this list, unless one of them really gets on your nerves close to deadline.

Plan your calendar around your deadline, remembering not to schedule any appointments on the morning of the fateful day. Do not plan to travel on the day your column is due. Tell yourself you will probably get the column in early, since you are so far along in the planning.

Agree to go to New Jersey with an old friend to pick out a slab of granite on the day your column is due. The absolutely last day it is due. Because surely you will have submitted it by then. Then proceed to plan a weekend away to work on your writing projects, your column among them.

Avoid distractions by secluding yourself in your country house with the dog. Pay no attention to the new batch of fleas that your presence re-ignites after three months of inactivity. Sleep in the guest room, to avoid contaminating the master suite. Let the dog sleep with you anyway. Who’s to know?

Don’t let the half-empty bottle of Christmas Cabernet go to waste. Order in from the Main Street Cafe, saving $6 on their six-ounce pour. Enjoy your dinner in the TV room, watching HGTV for four hours while you mull column topics. Let the dog curl up next to you. Scratch reflexively.

Hire the local dogwalker on the morning you plan to actually write, so that you can stay in your special writing pajamas until you are far enough along on the column to take a break without breaking the dog’s bladder. Pay the dogwalker half of what you get paid to write the column. Worry that the dog is confused by your absence on his daily walk. Spend your morning watching the Today Show because you never get to watch the Today Show and nobody is watching you, not even the dog.

Take a shower to wake up your chi. You don’t know what this means exactly but you know it works and anyway you’re beginning to smell yourself. Watch calmly as a flea jumps off your leg.

Decide to finish the bathroom tiling job you started in August because you finally remembered to buy a bottle of white vinegar to clean the epoxy haze off the tiles. Anyway, physical activity is a good stimulus to intellectual rigor. Sort of like waking up the chi.

Listen to NPR as you tile and consider the Presidential primaries as a possible column topic. Remember that Martin Luther King’s birthday is this week. Begin to feel your back spasm as you try to wipe epoxy grout off the underside of the new pedestal sink. Get distracted by a fisherman in the river.

Walk the dog as the grout dries. Start to panic about your deadline. Long for the stimulus of family. Decide to drive back to the city instead of writing. When your husband suggests you write about what it’s like to write a column, throw him a dark look. Stay up

really late writing about what it’s like to write a column.

- Cass Collins