For many reporters, getting a column is the pinnacle of a career. It didn’t used to be that way. Leon Hale started writing a column at the Houston Post in the late 1940s as a second task. His first priority was to cover farm news. As he went around the small towns gathering news he also listened to stories and started writing about people and places he knew and liked. The columns reflected the rural nature of Texas. Houston was full of people from small towns who could relate to Hale’s stories about growing up in various places around West Texas. He went to World War II, he came to Houston and married and started a family. He never wrote about politics. He never sold anything in his columns. I started reading him in the Houston Post in the 1950s. Eventually I wrote a profile of him for a magazine in 1984 when he was in his 60s. It’s posted at the right, under pages. Please pull it down and read it. I think it will give you some insight in writing. And I hope you’ll look for him on Sundays in the Chronicle.
Of course, times change and columnists change. Leon Hale was the right columnist at the right time. Houston was a much different city when he came here after the war.
So what are you going to write for your three columns?
Pick a theme. Are you going to write about politics, sports, culture, ethnicity? Find a broad theme about which you know something. Read some columnists. Who are the best at what you’re interested in? You could write a column about why they’re good. I like Frank Rich, the former NY Times theater critic who has become a Sunday political columnist for the Times. Rich and his editors figured out that politics is a kind of theater, and that Rich can interpret the scripts and delineate the scenes in the national political theater as well as he could review the plays on Broadway.
When Lisa Gray visits next Monday, you should have read some of her recent columns in the Chronicle. You will see her theme is the culture of Houston. She’s interested in architecture, the environment, the placeness of the place. Check out all the Chronicle columnists here.
