Do allow the reviews on Amazon to get you to buy this book influence you to really buy this book. It is that good! Suzette Martinez Standring is a past president of the US National Society of Newspaper Columnists and is a syndicated columnist with GateHouse News Services.

Early on in the book, Suzette says that no one ever really intends to be a columnist, and that really did touch on a nerve, because I always thought I’d be in merchant finance (thank God I’m not!). And I definitely had no intention on writing on employment, of all things. 

Back to the review, Suzette invites great columnists like Art Buchwald, Dave Barry and Pete Hamill to give their advice to the readers, which makes the book a must-read. Suzette herself has a warm humorous and friendly style, which makes the reader feel like she’s an old friend who’s sitting with you over coffee and having a conversation on column writing.

Suzette Martinez Standring

A chapter that really resounds like a gong in my head almost every conscious second since I’ve read it is Making of a Columnist, contributed by Leonard Pitts Jr. He said:

We get paid to have something everybody has [an opinion]. And on top of that, we are given something everyone else wants. A voice. A megaphone. The ability to be heard.

That also was something someone said to me recently. I have been given a space, and I should value that space and make full use of it. Since then, I guess, I have taken the space much more seriously.

This is a good book, and is for anyone who writes, not just journalists or columnists or writers.

You can check Suzette’s website here.

• Order her book here (or here for Kindle edition).
• Preview her book here.

I’ll leave you with ant excerpt from Section 2, contributed by Terry Marcotta Marotta (apologies to Terry for the error):

Shortly before she died, Erma [Bombeck] also said that when she stood before God at the end of her life, she hoped she wouldn’t have a single bit of talent left. “I used everything you gave me,” was what she hoped to tell her Creator.

Because don’t we all know? It will never be about what we won, or clung to or kept for ourselves. Always and only it will be about what we let go of and freely passed on, spending our gifts in the service of others.

How better to have used our talents and expressed our thanks for living than to have said how it felt to have been there? We can only say what we felt, or saw, or thought. As columnists we do this every day. How better to have spent a life?