Columnists are a varied bunch: soothing voices and ranters, high brow and low brow, laden with doctorates and soiled with diner coffee. Their topics are the sublime and the most mundane. They are like no one else and they are your next-door neighbors. They entertain and the inform. They make you think.

Before learning the basics of developing the style and voice of a columnist, read what a few columnists say about their chosen profession. Also check out our list of columnists, past and present.

INSIGHT INTO BEING A COLUMNIST FROM COLUMNISTS

ON BEING A WRITER

"I write for many reasons: to entertain, to make people laugh and cry, to make them think, to make myself think. Writing well is the most challenging thing I can imagine and there are days when I am simply trying to prove that I can do it."

– Karen Ray

ON BEING A COLUMNIST

"You're totally self-starting, totally dependent on your own ideas, when you write a column. You're constantly having to think and figure out what you think. It involves much more pressure than doing feature stories. … Whenever I write something, that's me out there, in a way it isn't when you're a feature story writer."

– Ellen Goodman

ON LOOKING AT THE NEGATIVE SIDE

"Not only have I always been in a state of rage, but I genuinely don't understand why everyone isn't. I don't think of it as being unusual; I think it's the only logical response to life. I think of my writing as an organized and rarified form of a tantrum. It's the only thing I know that keeps me from being a murderer."

– Fran Lebowitz

ON WRITING

"If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed."

– E. B. White

ON REWRITING

"I know few professional writers for whom a first draft is a finished draft. Students too often concentrate on how to go about getting published and don't pay enough attention to the part about writing interesting sentences and paragraphs that flow."

– Karen Ray

ON FINDING THE STORY

"I always wanted to be, and I basically consider myself to be a storyteller [who cherishes] the little stories I find while traveling around the country. … I'll go into a town and meet someone who has a small story to tell, but whose story might never have appeared in the newspaper otherwise."

– Bob Greene

ON THE PERFECT COLUMN

" The perfect column would be twenty-four laudable items - very short, pithy, and fast-paced. It would be a perfect mixture of several scoops, a few one-liners, a double entendre, a triple pun, a needle or two, an incredibly funny graffito, some morsels of choice gossip."

– Herb Caen