Fifteen Titles
And not a story in sight
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Recently I read Linda Caroll ‘s great article about titles. (Here) The article has stuck in my craw — which is a sign of a great article.
So I came home from work today utterly and profoundly exhausted. I am not complaining. After all, tomorrow will finally be the final, final, final last day of the job. But I have gotten very little writing done lately. I really felt like I needed to write a story.
But I was just too freaking exhausted tonight — if you’ll excuse my French.
And that is when Linda Caroll ‘s article came floating up to the surface of the cesspool of my noggin. I suddenly realized that maybe I didn’t need to write an article. Maybe I could just write a bunch of titles!
I have always enjoyed writing titles. I wrote titles long before I ever wrote articles. Back when I was in high school, around a hundred years ago, I took a quarter of Journalism. I mostly slept in that class because it came right after Band and Band was exhausting.
I often awoke from my naps to discover that the class was given an assignment of writing an article. And there would be a few classmates who came to me. They knew that my self-perceived forte was title writing. They would show me their half-assed, grammatically incorrect, pointless diatribes and then ask me to come up with a title for them.
I could usually come up with a title in a minute or two. I was paid in various different ways — not all of which were legal.
I was the title guy. I ended up just barely passing Journalism. On the next-to-last day of Journalism class the teacher stood before the class and announced that after 42 years of teaching Journalism she was retiring at the end of the year.
She then pointed directly at me, looked directly at me, and proclaimed, “In my 42 years of teaching Journalism, YOU are the very worst student I have ever had!”
I looked around and quickly realized that the entire class was looking at me. I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or filled with pride.
Did I mention that I was exhausted when I came home from work today?
