How to write a column.

Photo by Tracy Harris

I’ve been writing this Substack newsletter for five and a half years nearly every single day. It occurred to me recently that I haven’t described what goes into a typical day compiling the material necessary to produce this thing. Surprisingly, it’s not that complicated.

I spend most of the day going through what I have come to call my newsfeed – articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN, NBC News, Axios – I know I’m leaving out some, but you get the picture. The newsfeed also includes newsletters written by people whom you probably read yourself – Heather Cox Richardson, Heather Delaney Reese, Joyce Vance, Aaron Parnas, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, various writers from The Bulwark, Thom Hartmann from Raw America, Dean Blundell, Steve Schmidt, Political Wire, Mike Brock, Jay Kuo, Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens from Lincoln Square…

It’s an even longer list, but the most important person of all isn’t someone on my newsfeed but at the other end of the living room – Tracy Harris, my wife. After I’ve spent hours reading all the news and analysis I can stomach, what I do is this: I walk across the room and sit down in a chair next to Tracy and I start complaining. I can’t come up with a column. I’m tired of the Trump bullshit. I saw two things I might write about today, then I realized I already wrote about them a few days ago.

Tracy listens to me patiently, then she says something like, but what about that thing you told me before we took a nap, and she’ll mention something I brought up over lunch or when we were drinking coffee. And I’ll say…oh, yeah, I forgot about that, and I’ll start talking about something else I had read on the same subject.

It’s at that point, nearly every day, that Tracy will say, you’re writing your column. Get your notebook out and write it down.

If she doesn’t say that, she’ll suggest something she read about that I missed, or a news clip she sent me in a WhatsApp message that I somehow hadn’t gotten around to. She’s almost always right. The story I missed, or more likely forgot about, ends up being the subject of my column, and I’ll stand up and walk to my desk at the other end of the living room, and I’ll sit down and ponder for a moment, and then I’ll turn around, and I’ll say, I haven’t got a headline. Tracy will look over indulgently and say, yes, you do, you just said it out loud, but you didn’t write it down, and she’ll remind me of a phrase or a notion I had said when we were talking about something Joyce Vance had written, or an item I read in Political Wire, and I’ll turn back around and get going. I can’t write a column until I’ve got the headline, and about half the time, the idea for the headline, or the words themselves, come from Tracy.

Then I write the column.

When I’m finished, I copy and paste it into an email and send it to Tracy, who is still sitting across the living room, usually with one or even two cats on her lap, and she gets the email and opens it and starts reading the column back to me, out loud. She catches lots of stuff – misspellings, repetition of words, sometimes she’ll tell me to take out a redundant “fucking,” but what she really does is sharpen the thinking in the piece by pointing out gaps and missed opportunities and contradictions and logical shortcuts and assumptions that don’t cohere.

Listening to Tracy read the column is the most important thing that happens other than the process of writing itself. Her voice can spot breaks in rhythm and places where a period is necessary to complete a thought before moving on, just by the way she reads the words. If a sentence is flat, I hear it. If a line that I wrote that I thought was funny doesn’t work, I hear it. Every column I write changes during the time she reads it. Every one of them.

And now…ta da!...it’s working the other way around. Tracy has been writing her newsletter about our life in Milford with our five – count ‘em, five – cats and Ruby. Because her columns contain photos, when she’s finished, I move over to the sofa next to her so I can see the photos on her laptop, and I get to read her writing!

It works the same way between us. Reading Tracy’s words out loud has the same effect. Sometimes I’ll notice a missing comma, or a dropped letter, but more often, it’s the rhythm of her words that matters as I read them. I’ll be reading along, and Tracy will tell me to stop, and she’ll type in a word, or copy a sentence and move it somewhere else in the paragraph or start a new paragraph with that line.

It’s amazing, doing with Tracy’s column what she does for mine. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend that you read her latest column. It’s humorous, it’s touching, it’s fun. It’s part of our world brought to marvelous life in words and pictures. What could be better?

Uno's Marvelous Belly