21 Headlines for Articles I Might Write Someday
“‘Casablanca’ Is a Pretty Good Movie, and I Can Finally Prove It,” and other potential story titles. Or not. Whatever.
Writing for a living is hard, mainly because you have to string a lot of words together over and over again, not only in a different order than anything you’ve written before, but in a different order than anything anyone else has written before, too.
Writers in the olden days, like Charles Dickens and Flannery O’Connor —those are the only two I can think of right now, for some reason — had it much easier than writers today.
Think about it. If you were writing in 1855 or 1955, you could put just about anything down on paper and be pretty sure that no one else had ever written it before. But because everything around us is so damn fast these days, it’s getting harder and harder to write original stuff. In fact, so many people have written so many words through the centuries, and so many people are writing so many words right now, right this second, that it’s something of a miracle we’re not all plagiarizing each other every time we scribble a line.
That’s just math.
But the most difficult part about writing something original is deciding what to write in the first place, and gauging whether or not anyone else is going to want to read it.
This is especially difficult for writers who are only curious about a few things. For example, if I had my druthers, I’d write about old-timey robots, falconers training their birds to control rat populations in city parks, the return of the Age of Airships (it is going to happen), and the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s pretty much it. But I know, from hard experience, that the general public’s appetite for those particular topics is limited. So I keep a little notebook with what I like to call “ideas” for “headlines.”
I almost always come up with a headline before I write an article, review, or essay. Editors will tell you that’s an ass-backwards way of doing things. Fortunately, because of the internet and the concentration of so much media in just a handful of filthy rich hands, there are fewer and fewer editors around these days, so writers don’t have to pretend to listen to their advice anymore.
Anyway, here are some examples of what I’m talking about — headlines for articles I might write someday. I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to work on any of them. But if I do, I sure hope some editor doesn’t screw them up.
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Does Your Poop Smell Like Asphalt? You’re Probably Not Dying
7 Ways to Tell If You’re Cheating on Your Partner
Wait. So Is Pluto a Planet, or What?
If Only They Made Spanx for the Soul
Restless Leg Syndrome Saved My Marriage
It’s Just Not Right, Damn It
I’m Not a Big Fan of That Wooden Escalator at the Herald Square Macy’s
8 Reasons Salma Hayek Reminds Me of My Dad
An Open Letter to the American Gastroenterology Association
23 Headlines for Articles I Might Write Someday
I Saw the Best Knuckleballers of My Generation Destroyed by Madness
‘Breaking Bad’ Saved My Marriage
A Striped Bass Spoke to Me. Here’s What She Said.
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, My Ass!
I’ve Never Met a Flugelhorn Player I Didn’t Like
‘Casablanca’ Is a Pretty Good Movie, and I Can Finally Prove It
Where Have All the Waterbeds Gone?
My Bypass Lopper Goes Everywhere I Go
Alcohol and Trans Fats Saved My Marriage
Don’t Stand There and Tell Me You Don’t Eat Grass When You’re Nervous
For a Genius, John Steinbeck Sort of Sucks
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There you have it. I feel pretty good about all of them, except for maybe the one about flugelhorns. I know how controversial those instruments can be.
