I’m finally reading The Soloist by Steve Lopez. I’ll see the movie when I’m done with the book. On p. 51, Lopez comments about his process of becoming a columnist:

I struggled with my first columns [at the Oakland Tribune], just as I did after moving on to the San Jose Mercury News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s that I had an epiphany. The challenge isn’t to figure out how to write, I realized, but why. Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.