How to become a magazine columnist

Yeah, I’d still suggest taking a journalism course. If you want to get into magazines it’s still really good to have a basic grounding of how publications work and things like editing, knowing how to edit your own work and sub-editing, just general kind of layout of an article and, and all that sort of stuff is what you learn at journalism school. A lot of people want to get into that kind of area because it’s perceived as probably more fun than doing other kinds of general reportage or whatever. So if you’re going to go into it, I would suggest really knowing your topic very, very well. sort of choosing something, and then getting to know it really well. I mean if it’s kind of celebrity stuff then, if that’s what you want to do, find out all about it and become a real expert and that will give you a , what’s the word I’m looking for, you know (laughs) that will help you.

An advantage

An advantage, yeah. (laughs). I can speak, I can talk, I can write but I can’t speak (laughs).

No I think that’s right. It’s interesting because I remember being, you know, probably at your age the same thing. I love to write, therefore I’m going to be a journalist. It’s a different way of writing, if you love English, journalism isn’t necessarily the way to go. I mean in radio, we write stories in three or four sentences … so all this love I had of writing short stories and poetry and things like that, they’re not really the skills that I take to journalism. Writing columns is more creative and expressive than journalism, but, you know, journalism is expository writing. It’s dealing with the facts. You can be a bit creative with it, but it’s not the same as fiction. It’s non-fiction, it’s different stuff. With columns, I think some of the best ones are actually very creative, very personality based writing. Just because you love writing, doesn’t mean you can write a great column. There is, as Julie says, there are rules to writing, there is structure to be involved, there’s use of language … that I think, it’s really helpful to go to a course to learn about. I was talking to Renee the other day, who is one of our most, I mean you know, she’s well into her 60’s/70’s now and she’s one, been one of our successful female playwrights. She knows a thing or two about writing. She’s just decided to write poetry. She’s going to courses to learn to write poetry because she acknowledges that they are simply different skills. So just be, be mindful of that and I think that advice of actually becoming very knowledgeable about your area is perfect. Good Luck.