The Long And Short Of It

One of the lesser weaknesses I have in my writing is how I put titles on things. Now, I call it a “lesser weakness” because I know it doesn’t really matter and could probably be perennially ignored or put off until the rest of the work is finished, like, I didn’t have a good title for Write What You Know until I had nearly finished the thing. But there are other times where I flounder -- without a title to attach a central theme to, I sometimes lose track of what I was writing about.

One way I’ve found to get around this is to use longer titles. Generally, they’re just more detailed versions of what I would already use, often with an “or” stuck in there somewhere. For example, this post could easily have been titled: The Long And Short Of It (Or: How To Keep Focus When Every Other Method Fails You (And Yes, I’m Aware Of The Irony)).

That’s another thing that I like doing, actually. I like how titling things can add a little bit of humor to the proceedings. I don’t do it to things I need to seriously show other people. I don’t snark when writing a college paper on it but I did at one point have a paper with the concise title: Moving The Goalposts: Clarke’s Third Law Shows Its Age.

The closest I can think of for where I got the inspiration to do this is Kurt Vonnegut, with such classic either/or titles like Slaughterhouse Five Or: The Children’s Crusade and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater Or: Pearls Before Swine. Or maybe my inspiration is closer to Philip K. Dick who graced us with such titles as Doctor Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After The Bomb and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Obviously, I’m not trying to compare myself to these authors in any more than a superficial level, but that is where I got the idea. Probably.

I don’t know if there’s a conclusion here. Like, this post was more of a reflection on a thing I do, and I’m not going to keep doing it (or the other way, doing it more) just because I wrote 404 words about it. But I did want to write it in case longer titles do start showing up in these posts. So I guess be on the lookout for that? No promises, though.

-F