Titles that Lie

Let us discuss blog post titles and the headlines of contemporary publications. Fictional titles are blurbs about lies, and that is perfectly acceptable. If Stephen King had called his master horror tale It,  Clarence the Clown or Melvin The Spider the content would still scare you out of your recliner. 

Bloggers are sellers of ideas and products. Most good posts range between 350 and 750 words. That’s not much time or content to make a point.  The writer must be both concise and compelling with his arguments. The title should be both captivating and enticing. Lying, while it might suck you in one time, won’t work the next time.

The two most often used lies on writing blogs are

1) “I am a Writer, and I will make you a Writer too.”

This person could sell snake oil at a  rattlesnake convention. The first scent of mendacity is when you look at the bio and see the author expounds he is, in fact, a successful writer. He is the writer of at least five well received and sought after books on writing and personal development. What you don’t see is all the books are self-published, poorly written, and are freely given away to help convince you to follow his unusual and unique “Develop as a Writer” class. The class which usually sell for $1500 is now available for just $900. If you act within the next 24 hours, you will get the early bird 33% discount on top of that. A lot of people will pay to be told they are a writer especially when it is a "successful writer" doing the telling. Let me be really obvious about this one point. If you have to tell people you are a writer, you probably are not. 

There is an excellent variation of this lie in extensive use today.  This is the lie of “Write 500 words a day and you…”. I’m still not sure what you get from writing 500 words a day, but I do give a certain validity to the argument because it has one important outcome for some of the people who practice it. It imparts a degree of discipline. If you can write 500 words a day of good prose, you are doing something right. If you write 500 “WTF’s” daily, you gain nothing. If your writing is incoherent, you learn nothing. The discipline is an excellent goal to realize, so I applaud those who follow this regimen. By itself, discipline does not and will not make you a writer.

2)  “I have published 5 posts a day for the last 526 days, and this is what I have Learned.” 

I have altered this headline with the number of posts and the length of time stated. The inherent lie is the statement that something of value has been learned and will be shared. This lie suckered me in just last week as I really wanted to understand what he had learned and how it had affected him. 

This was a six-page post. Page one thru five were pictures; one per page. Each picture was of a yellow writing pad with much of the writing crossed out, and a pen laying across each page. The finale of this work was an acknowledgment that he had learned little. If the e-zine publishing this work had an editor with the slightest understanding of content the article would never have seen the light of day. 

When you publish, you have an obligation to the reader to produce a coherent and convincing body of thought. Your title should be written with the same commitments in mind.

Comments are welcome and appreciated.