WRITING
I Wanted To Write A Simple Story About Rejection and Finding Solace in The Garden . . . I Ended Up In Headline Writing Hell
I still want to write that story — all about my annus horribilis of endless revisions, rejected manuscripts, and carefully constructed queries that went nowhere, and how, when writing became more pain than pleasure, I found solace in the garden.
That’s the teaser for when I get around to finishing it, which I will . . . don’t hold your breath though, I just wrote a piece on procrastination.
But this is all about the hours I spent in headline writing hell.
I’d been reading about the importance of headlines. How a good title will get you 500 more readers overnight, how $$$ in your title can turn you into an internet sensation. Do this, don’t do that. The bottom line, I gather, is that however brilliant your article might be, without a good title to draw in readers, forget about it.
Made sense to me. I found a free site, one of many, that analyzes your headlines.
This is an entirely new area for me. When I wrote romances for Harlequin, I’d come up with a working title, then the editors would come up with something completely different and, usually, embarrassing.
The working title for my first book, which I hadn’t originally written as a romance (I was more high-minded then) was A Degree of Compromise. The editors changed it to The Doctor Delivers which sounded a bit cheesy to me, but it was out of my hands by then.
But back to my garden story which, if not for the damn headline analyzer, I would have posted hours earlier.
I copied and pasted this title into the analyzer box:
When Writing Became More Pain than Pleasure, I Found Solace In The Garden
A dud. It scored below average on all three counts.
Back to the drawing board. I changed a few things, got a slightly better overall score, but still below average on engagement and impression. Then I changed some more things around with no better results.
I took a closer look at the instructions . . . it drives my partner crazy that reading instructions is never the first thing I do before blithely forging ahead and, inevitably, screwing up. You’d save yourself so much time he always says. Yeah, yeah yeah, I always reply.
So according to the instructions, the trick to an increased engagement score is to use celebrity names and ‘humanize’ the title with words such as hair, friend, and laugh.
To increase my impression score, I’d need to use more context words.
Context words?
These are words that force you to think more things. Chair, for example, only makes you think about a few things, while the word, history makes you think about a whole lot more. If the instructions say so, I guess it must be true.
The instructions also say that certain context words, there are a thousand or so, will make your title irresistible.
I wanted an irresistible title, but my brain was hurting.
And yet feeding words into the damn title analyzer was like feeding slots in Las Vegas. The sun went down, the lights came on, my partner inquired about dinner. Just one more try, I muttered. Just one more word change to get a better engagement score.
My partner informed me he was going to bed. The sun rose. My partner inquired about breakfast.
Nothing. I sat there, hunched over the laptop, parched and starving, desperate for the loo, but unable to stop feeding the headline analyzer.
And then, it happened. My headline hit the jackpot. The winning combination, 100 percent in every category.
Kerching!!!!!!!!
Madonna removed all her clothes in my historic garden and told me how to make a million bucks with my writing, then we got drunk on Veuve Clicquot, laughed, and brushed each other's hair
Feel free to use it if you’d like to quadruple your followers and become an internet sensation. I’m not sure it’s quite what I had in mind.
If you’d like to read some of my other stories, plus thousands of others on Medium, why not subscribe?
Part of your subscription will help struggling writers like me and other struggling (and much younger) writers on Medium. Thanks!
Just hit the link: https://janicemacdonald.medium.com/membership