Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: The Column That Never Was
Alakazam!
Note: This is the sixteenth in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
My first goal when submitting my first letter to a newspaper in 2019 was mere publication. I say “mere” but it was actually very important to me. I had just begun writing after retiring from my career as a programmer. I wanted to write short stories and to have them published. I had not yet learned about writing contests, so I thought magazines were the only route to publication. I was willing to put in the time to write some quality fiction, but I imagined it would take me at least a year, possibly longer, to get something published.
I craved ink and I wanted it right away.
That craving led to the idea of writing letters, which led to everything else described in this Road Trip series.
But underneath both the craving for immediate ink and the desire for more substantial success in magazines and literary journals, there lurked another desire: I wanted to be a newspaper columnist.
My inner critic ridiculed the notion. It told me that every old guy who writes thinks that he could write a better column than the ones he sees in his local paper. Fair enough—I did think that. The critic also told me that editors are probably flooded with submissions from guys who think they are the next Lewis Grizzard or Dave Barry or George Will or Carl Hiassen (to name a few of my favorites). I honestly didn’t think I was the next anybody, and I would hate to find myself called out as derivative of even my favorite columnists. I thought I had a solid, original voice. But I do think it is fair to assume that editors would see unsolicited column submissions as oh boy yet another guy who think’s he’s <insert well-known columnist name>.
I did not try to write sample columns on any particular theme or with any particular viewpoint. So I didn’t flip that switch in editors’ heads (at least not right away). But I did see my earliest letters as perhaps adding up to a portfolio that I could later use to justify being given some column space.
This desire probably explains my early habit of exceeding word limits for letters. I thought that my wonderful, funny essays would blow editors away and they would yell, “Stop the presses! This came in over the letter wire, but we need to make this guy a columnist!”
That not only didn’t happen, but most of my over-long letters didn’t get published even as letters. It was only after a month or so of failures, combined with studying newspapers and coming to some realizations about what they were looking for in a letter, that I stopped writing long-form commentary and buckled down to writing stuff that suited my market.
I abandoned the idea of being a columnist, but I got the ink I craved.
But then, after I completed my goal of nationwide publication, the idea of being a columnist cleared its throat from the corner to which I had banished it and it said, “Hey, Daddy-o, remember me?”
Why yes, now that he mentioned it, I did remember.
Back when I was an aspiring columnist with zero publications to my name, I wrestled with the fact that while I thought I could do humorous commentary, I didn’t really have an idea that would lead to being able to write something interesting twice a week, or even once a week. I had no particular area that I would focus on, no subject about which I was obsessive, no basis even for observational humor. I was just a guy who thought he could write.
Now, though, with letters published all over the country, I had what I thought was a column-worthy idea: what if I wrote about the world as I saw it through the study of local newspapers? Good idea, but how to do it? My first thought was that I could build a column around one letter at a time. Most letters are 300 words or fewer, given the word limits. So I could start each column with some amusing discussion about my virtual visit to a town, then end it with a letter of mine that had actually been published in that town. I had a good supply of letters built up, and I could continue submitting letters while also writing the column.
I like that idea, and in fact my Road Trip blog posts probably qualify as something like that column, except that they are much more about the writing project itself and not about the people and places I encountered online. But that’s that column idea in nascent form: commentary plus actual letters.
But before ever trying to execute that idea, I tried something else. I decided to create a fictional journalist, and to write observational humor, similar to my letters, in his name. In effect, I would take my already largely fictional letters, and build even more fictional adventures based on them.
Thus was born my alter-ego, Rooster (“Milford”) Ledewell.
Remember earlier how I said I wouldn’t want to be seen as derivative of Grizzard/Barry/etc.? Well, if someone said I was obviously derivative of Milford (“Stanley”) Poltroon, right down to the structure of my pseudonym, then I would doff my cap to that person and I would welcome the accusation. Because MSP, the late editor of The Wretched Mess News, was a genius. While I was also inspired by various Lampoon magazines (Harvard and National) and by many another absurdist writers, Poltroon’s How to Fish Good was my humor Bible for some formative teenage years. It taught me that a determined writer could wring a joke or two or six out of just about any topic. It also taught me the importance of truth in satire (it is of zero importance).
So naturally I stole the format of MSP’s fictional name, and I even used his first name as “my” middle name. I used “Rooster” as my first name because I have tried on occasion to promote that as my own nickname, with zero success so far. “Ledewell” is journalism insider talk. A “lede” is the opening sentence of a news article, and should summarize the most important aspects of the story. So I “lede” well. Ledewell. Get it? GET IT? I’m sure you get it.
Thus inspired and thus pseudonymed, I wrote six sample columns and sent them off to the syndicates. This was in late summer of 2021. Allowing for slow mails, pandemic short-staffing, and multiple rounds of reading and commenting, I now firmly believe that my columns were unanimously and silently rejected in about the middle of October of 2021.
But hey! If I have learned anything, it’s that I can publish whatever I want on my own blogs! The six sample columns are in a separate area of my Column Inches blog.
Oh, and as for my youthful (back when I was 58 years old) thought that I could write better than the local columnists in most papers: I no longer think that. I can write better satire than most of them, perhaps, but that is not the same thing as being able to maintain a long-running general-interest column. Writing such a column is a specific skill, and writing talent is only part of it.
Along with learning to respect the work of editors, I grew to understand that lifestyle columnists, (mild) humor columnists, local pundits—all of those folks have a voice and a viewpoint that must have appealed to editors and readers in their market, and while I may not enjoy everything they write, there is a demand for it. Are they scathingly funny? Not often. In fact, most are not humorous at all. What they are is relatable to enough readers to keep them filling their rightfully-earned column inches.
Good for them.
Boing!