Column Writing 101

I am often asked how I manage to craft such consistently extraordinary columns.

With a smile and that cute way I have about me, I usually respond, “None of your damn business.”

I mean, come on, that’s like asking Coke for the secret formula.

But I woke up the other morning, fresh from completing yet another wonderful column, and I thought, oh, what the heck. Share the magic.

First, find a troubling problem about which the readers pray the Cohen column will resolve.

For instance, the Hartford downtown public library has had a problem with crazy, fragrant-challenged, homeless, drug-addicted, noisy, inebriated customers, who seemingly make the joint less attractive for the rest of us.

That is the problem that our column will address. Next, the column must offer some perspective, some global understanding of the issue of libraries that are inhabited by Martians and the like.

You need some unique personal experience to bring perspective to a column. I, for instance, have traveled widely, including such places as Berlin, Conn.; Scotland, Conn.; Lebanon, Conn.; and, of course, at Christmas time, a quick trip to Bethlehem, Conn.

My perspective on the crazy-people-in-the-library problem is that Hartford is not the only city to host slumber parties for homeless patrons.

For instance, Heathrow Airport in London is “home” to hundreds of clever homeless crazy people, who pretend to be stranded customers with flights that had been delayed or cancelled or rerouted through the “B” terminal at Bradley International.

This summer, the public library in Worcester, Mass., limited the number of books that homeless people could check out to two, while allowing God-fearing, sweet-smelling patrons with permanent addresses to take out up to 40 books at a time.

In Philadelphia, the Free Library of Philadelphia staffed the library bathrooms with formerly homeless people, to provide counseling and stern warnings to the homeless visitors who used the bathrooms as their personal, well, bathrooms and showers and stuff.

There. The column has provided perspective. Now, of course, the column must offer up a solution.

None of this “the poor will always be with us/show a little compassion” kind of a solution. This is a business publication. Shareholder value is all we care about and, as far as the problems of the little people, well, “our employees are our most important asset.” That’s all we have to say about that.

No, we need an efficient, amoral, solution that HBJ readers will appreciate. In the case of the library and its crazy people, the easiest solution would be to “get tough on crime,” arming the staff with muskets.

This is where a smart columnist earns his keep. The get-tough-on-crime option has its downside. As far back as the 17th Century, Connecticut’s “Code of 1650” criminalized “idlers” and outlawed shuffleboard.

You see the problem? If you go after idlers and shufflers in the library, you may sweep up West End patrons of the arts by mistake, given that they look almost identical to idlers, in the context of a library.

The best solution? Require that every disheveled patron of the library enroll in a Wallace Stevens poetry seminar. Wallace Stevens was a surety bond attorney at the old Hartford Fire Insurance and Poetry Co., who became unjustifiably famous for writing unfathomable poetry that didn’t rhyme or anything. He has many fans among the Hartford library elite.

Five minutes of Wallace Stevens poetry will send every homeless person running from the library, screaming. The middle-class patrons of the library will be too pretentious to leave, pretending that they grasp the “deeper meaning” of a Stevens poem.

There. Problem solved. Column complete.

Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.