So… You Want to be a Columnist

By Erma Bombeck
Published in Matrix, Summer 1972

I always thought gaining entrance into that elite society of female syndicated columnists was like working for the New York Times.

You either had to be sired by an editor and birthed in the building, or be in the office and have your shots when someone died.

I honestly don’t know if there are any set rules to becoming syndicated. If there are, I broke everyone of them.

• Big Names Sell Columns!

I gave up my real name (which is Wayne Newton) to write under my married name. The results have been phenomenal. During the last eight years of syndication I have gone from “Erma who?” to “Erma whats-her-name” to “Sounds like Steinbeck.”

• Reside in a Large City Where News Happens!

I came directly from the pages of the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a weekly in the suburb of Centerville, Ohio (which is a suburb of Bellbrook.) The column was called Zone 59. Everyone thought it was my age and kept asking me to write about irritability during the menopause.

• Have A Saleable Topic That Cannot Be Duplicated By Local Staffers Such As Advice, Knitting, Politics, High Fashion, Exercise, Etc.

I had three unplanned kids, a degree in English and considered ironed sheets a health hazard. I wanted to share this with the world.

• Be Aggressive. Have Faith In Your Material. As Soon As It Is Rejected By One Syndicate, Try Another.

I sat on my duff while three men molded my literary future: Glenn Thompson, executive editor of the Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald who plucked me from the pages of the weekly and ran interference for me with a syndicate; Tom Dorsey, director of Newsday Syndicate who took a flier on an unknown; and Bill Bombeck, my husband, who encouraged me with lines like, “A woman who sends her oven out to be cleaned every four years can’t be all bad.”

If there is one thing I do know about, it is frustration. There is a lot of creative talent out there in Leftover Land that will never find fulfillment planting daisies in toilet tanks or reading the ingredients on dogfood cans.

Whether or not this creative talent finds an outlet in writing depends on how badly they want it and what price they are willing to pay for it.

The frustration follows a pattern. First, you sit around and talk back to bylines. “You’d better watch it, Sylvia Porter. If I hadn’t written the bank check to cover my overdraft you’d be out of business! Poor Ann, you’re losing your touch, Baby. It’s old fashioned to go on the pill. Haven’t you ever heard of garlic? Okay, Heloise, if you’re so clever, tell me what to do with 3,758 Col. Sanders buckets under my sink!”

After your one-way conversation with the women in print, you break down and buy a 60-cent copy of Writer’s Digest and submit a few manuscripts to the slicks. You send a joke to Phyllis Diller—a poem to Paul Harvey and eventually you nail an editor to the wall at a cocktail party and show him the clever grocery list you just wrote.

About 90% of the hopefuls will talk themselves out of writing. Like the woman who said, “Having run out of literary contacts, I decided to write for posterity,” the whole idea will fizzle. For the 10% of you who are still with me, this is all I know about syndication.

How do you get started? Stop talking and start writing. You’ll never know if there is water in the pool until you jump in. I walked off the street and asked an editor to write. He paid me $3 and I was over-paid considering what I got in experience.

Where do you get started? There are about 150 syndicates and their addresses are listed in Editor and Publisher. (Available on newsstands.)

What are your chances? Every year at Publishers-Hall Syndicate (which distributes At Wit’s End) 3,000 people knock on their door with ideas for syndication. Since they make quite an investment of time, talent and money into a new feature, they take on about one every four years.

Should you make inquiries first? Dick Sherry, vice president of Publishers-Hall says simply, “Mail in about three or four samples of what you do. EVERYTHING IS REVIEWED. We don’t look for anything in particular subject-wise. Only fresh ideas and general topics that will sell.”

What about timing and style? It helps to be first. About style. I have always felt writers talk too much about it. A style is an invisible signature that you forget about and let happen. It’s you!

Preparation: I don’t want to disillusion the housewife who writes prose on a coffee filter or who thinks an editor would be amused to find her humor written on a roll of yellow toilet tissue, but writing to me is a profession. I serve my time in the trade for seven years on the Dayton Journal Herald (from copy girl to columnist), edited a Shopping News for a couple of years and did public relations for the Dayton YWCA’s for five years. A profession calls for professionalism. Professionalism calls for clean, white paper, headed at the top with your name, double spaced, clean, coherent with words spelled correctly.

Advantages? The obvious one is money. Syndication has brought ground round to our table, winters for our orthodontist in Palm Beach, not to mention life’s little necessities. (Having the dog’s teeth capped in case he goes into show business.)

A job in your home that gives you the best without selling Tupperware. I can put in a load of clothes and while it is pulsating, run through my typewriter with my bare fingers.

An incredible feeling of awe at being able to put a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and creating something out of it that makes a tired housewife in Passaic laugh at herself. I will never get over that feeling.

Disadvantages. One word. Constancy. As a group, we cannot enjoy the luxury of sweet inspiration, personal depression, sick leave, or look forward to strikes, a plague of locusts or the end of the world. My kids may wear Saran Wrap for underwear, but the column is on the desk of 300 editors every week. One editor suggested to me that a column must be like being married to a nymphomaniac. (Maybe Buchwald would care to comment on that. I wouldn’t.)

How are newspaper trends affecting the columnist? The push toward vibrant, alive, fresh columns about and by women is a healthy sign. But before you cancel your Blue Cross, note that there are a few female political columnists, a few cartoonists and one sports writer. Breakthrough should be over the horizon. Don’t be caught without your shots.

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