When columns become art

One thousand words. That is roughly the space a newspaper columnist gets to say something worth a reader’s time. It sounds generous until you start writing. There is a deadline, facts to check, and readers who can leave after one boring paragraph. That is when you learn: short writing is not easy writing.

This came to mind while reading fellow Ilonggo writer Noel Galon de Leon’s recent piece, “The Column as Creative Work.” His argument deserves attention, especially in universities trying to define what counts as creative output. De Leon makes an important distinction: not every column becomes creative work simply because somebody puts a byline on it. But it can become one when research, observation, argument, memory, language, voice, and imagination are worked into something original.

Anyone who has written a regular column knows how unromantic the process can be. Inspiration rarely arrives carrying coffee at 10:00 p.m. More often, there are three possible topics, six browser tabs, an old notebook, and a deadline getting dangerously close. You read. You verify. You delete a paragraph you liked because it leads nowhere. You move the ending. You cut 150 words. De Leon describes much the same labor: research, verification, weighing perspectives, choosing what stays, and revising repeatedly. That sounds remarkably like creative work because it is.

Creativity itself carries unnecessary mythology. We picture the artist waiting for lightning to strike, preferably somewhere scenic. Yet psychologist Teresa Amabile offers a more useful picture: creative work draws on expertise, imaginative thinking, and motivation. The columnist cannot wait for the muse. Wednesday remains Wednesday, whether the muse reports for work or files leave.

Teachers understand this. Tell a class, “Write anything creative,” and half the room may stare at the ceiling. Say, “In 500 words, tell the story of one ordinary object in your home that says something about your family,” and suddenly there are rice cookers, rosaries, electric fans, graduation photographs, sewing machines, and one Tupperware container that has apparently survived three generations. Creativity needs room, but some structure helps. A column lives inside that tension—limited space, factual obligations, editorial standards, and freedom over what to make of them.

This is where column writing separates itself from simply having an opinion. Filipinos have no shortage of those. Spend ten minutes in a sari-sari store, faculty room, jeepney queue, family group chat, or Facebook comment section and you can collect enough for a Sunday supplement. A column asks more. The writer takes that first reaction—Naku, ano naman ini?—and subjects it to evidence, context, reflection, and craft. Personal experience may open the door, but it cannot furnish the entire house. De Leon calls the column a meeting place between the personal and the public.

That is also why the column sits comfortably beside creative nonfiction, which remains accountable to reality while using narrative and literary techniques to make reality intelligible. Scholarship describes the form as combining reliable empirical information with imaginative and narrative approaches (Kotišová, 2019). A columnist may begin with an old acacia tree being cut down, move into records on urban development, remember students once waiting beneath its shade, and end by asking what a city chooses to remember. The facts remain facts. Creativity lies in the connections, selection, pacing, imagery, voice, and insight.

This matters particularly in Western Visayas. Columns in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, Filipino, or English can capture things institutional reports rarely do: an expression grandparents use less often, a changing plaza, a disappearing craft, the way young people speak, an old building everyone passes but few really see. Regional columns can preserve memory and document changes in language, culture, and place. A spreadsheet may tell us how many heritage structures remain. A good column can help us understand why losing one might hurt.

There is even a useful legal footnote. Section 172 of the Philippine Intellectual Property Code includes articles and other writings, as well as periodicals and newspapers, among original intellectual creations protected as literary and artistic works. This does not mean every column deserves an award, faculty credit, or creative-work classification. Copyright establishes neither artistic excellence nor scholarly significance. Routine announcements, promotional pieces, ordinary reporting, and lightly considered opinions do not become substantial creative works simply because we call them columns.

That qualification strengthens the case. Universities need not recognize everything; they need to distinguish things well. A serious creative column may be examined for originality, research, factual responsibility, voice, craftsmanship, editorial selection, cultural significance, and depth of interpretation. A poem should not have to masquerade as a scientific article to prove that work went into it. Neither should a column need a methodology section, three tables, and a conceptual framework before an institution notices the thinking behind it.

There is also a practical test: where the column appears and how it got there. A piece published by a legitimate newspaper or established digital news platform has usually passed through editors—and often publishers—who judge whether it is accurate, readable, relevant, responsible, creatively crafted, and worth the space. It resembles informal peer review—not academic peer review, but professional scrutiny by practicing editors and publishers. Not everything submitted gets published. Publication alone does not prove creativity, but repeated acceptance by independent editors shows that the work has met standards beyond the writer’s own judgment.

Academics should take this seriously for another reason. Universities routinely ask faculty to bring knowledge beyond campus through public engagement, knowledge translation, community relevance, and research utilization. Yet when a professor turns difficult ideas into something ordinary people actually read over breakfast, the work can appear less scholarly precisely because it is accessible. Clarity is not evidence that little thinking occurred. Often, it means much thinking did.

CHED, too, may need to look more closely at where serious column writing fits within its recognition of faculty creative work. The point is not to give academic credit to every opinion piece, but to recognize those showing sustained originality, research, craftsmanship, editorial scrutiny, and public value. If universities value knowledge brought beyond campus, the forms that successfully carry it there deserve a fair look.

The best columns leave traces of their making without showing all the scaffolding. The research is there, but it does not parade around in a lab coat. The writer takes a position but knows where certainty should end. Humor can enter without making light of people. Personal experience can illuminate without making the writer the center of every story. And before asking what clever thing can be said, the writer asks something quieter: What is worth saying here, and whom might my words affect?

So, yes, Noel Galon de Leon has a point worth defending: a column can be creative work. Not because every 1,000-word opinion deserves artistic status, but because good columns require real craft—observing closely, checking facts, reading widely, thinking deeply, choosing carefully, and revising until something familiar can be seen differently.

Perhaps creativity is simpler than we make it sound. We notice something—a word, a student’s question, an old memory, a headline, a scene on the street—and stay with it long enough to discover there is more to say.

The byline tells us who wrote the column. The writing tells us what the writer created. The work behind it tells us whether it deserves to be called creative.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ‘student of and for life’ who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.