Writing Requires a Community, and Thoughts on Titles
Two important elements that will help you get established
Hello everyone!
I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. In my household, it’s up to me to cook the turkey, so that always results in a busy morning. My daughters are good at helping me, and I’m pleased to report that I succeeded in my cooking duties (it was done but not too dry…nobody got sick).
Despite what fascist right wing “propaganda disguised as news” stations will tell you, prices are noticeably down lately. I got my turkey with a digital coupon for only $5. Everything was going great at checkout until the lady behind the register asked if I qualified for the 55 or older discount.
“It was going so well until you said that,” I replied with a laugh (I think I inadvertently embarrassed her, that wasn’t my intention).
My family and I plopped down and didn’t leave the house for all of Thanksgiving break and it was just what we needed. I’ve been doing 10,000 steps a day and it’s been wearing me out. I have a wonderful time walking through the woods with my kids.
Walking through the woods gives me time to think about writing and other things (if there are other things).
The joys of community
I started thinking about the need for community a little more after writing this article for Medium. In my days as a teacher, I always found I had more success when I treated my students as equals. I don’t like stomping around and howling about how I need to be “respected.” It seems to me that receiving respect is a natural consequence of treating others respectfully.
The same attitude works in writing. Both Medium and Substack offer a very nice community of thoughtful people who provide encouragement and inspiration. I think it’s particularly important to read the newsletters of editors who run big publications on Medium. When you get an idea of what’s on their minds lately, it serves as a writing prompt for what they’re looking to publish.
To say that another way, don’t sit around waiting for editors to post “WRITING PROMPT!” If you read their work, you enter the conversation naturally. Also, I find that the editors of the publications where I like to submit are all thoughtful individuals. Their insights both on writing and life are very helpful.
Comments and the dangers of cell phones
I try my best to reply to anyone who is courteous enough to leave a comment on one of my articles. First of all, engagement contributes to how much writers are paid, so things like claps, highlights, and comments, are a wonderful way to support a writer. Even writing “Good article!” is much appreciated.
I have a couple readers who take the time to write comments that are so long they should be published as essays. In fact, I’ve encouraged these readers to do that. I’ve even read a couple comments that would be boost-worthy articles. But, for whatever reason, some people are more content to express themselves in the form of comments rather than articles.
I simply want to emphasize that these comments are extremely important. Some of them I agree with, some of them make me stop and think. These days, I try to stay out of getting into comment battles, but emotions can run high on provocative topics.
The first thing I do in the morning is read and answer all the comments. That’s like a farmer tilling the soil before planting. Sometimes somebody says something that directs me towards what I need to write about that day. But even if I don’t write an article in response to a comment, those thoughts are downloaded into my mind and they do inform the articles that come later.
We’ve got to make progress as a society together, and lately I feel like some momentum has been gathering. I also appreciate it when the writers I follow provide their thoughts on a similar topic that I’ve either written about recently, or have been planning to write about. What that tells me is that there’s something in the water that compels everyone to work on the same problem. That’s good. We’re allies in a common cause, the more insight we can provide to each other, the better it is for everybody.
Sometimes in my rush to answer everyone, I end up having to leave responses on my cell phone. Cell phones are awful and it’s really easy to leave spelling errors. I wouldn’t want to inadvertently write something offensive because predictive text stuck a word in there that it wasn’t my intention to use. I might have to adopt the policy of only responding when I’m at my computer, even if that means some of the comments slip through the cracks.
Titles
For those of you who are new to Medium, or writing anywhere on the internet for that matter, the need for a good title is something I can’t emphasize enough. Lately, I’ve been using CoSchedule. That’s not an affiliate link, I just believe in the service.
When I’m looking for articles to nominate, a bad title can be disqualifying all on its own. Too many people approach internet writing like it’s still the 1800s. Yes, there was a time when you could title your essay, “Blue” and everyone would walk away acting like you were super profound and poetic.
Today, boost nominators like me see “Blue” and we snort and scroll on by.
I say this because I could go to the archive section of any topic on Medium and 9 out of 10 of the titles would be awful.
For example, you might find an article with the title “The Shadow of Oppression.” Yeah, that sounds vaguely ominous and all, but it only scores a 43 on the CoSchedule analyzer tool.
43! You want something in the 70s at minimum. 43 is awful.
Why is it awful? Well, let me try and explain…
It’s awful because you can’t really tell what the article is about by the title. “The Shadow of Oppression” is so vague and disconnected that people see it and think, “I bet the article is vague and disconnected too.”
I think writers are confused about the purpose of a title. They think it’s an artistic element. While that’s true to some extent, it needs to be an artistic element, and a showcase of relevant SEO keywords. Your title is prime real estate. Using a title like “The Shadow of Oppression” is like using only two tags when you can add as many as five (I see people do that all the time too, those tags are traffic magnets, use them!).
I wrote an article recently titled, Will History Come to Regard the United States As a Colossal Villain?
That one scored an 83, and the article has been performing really well. First of all, it’s a question (that gets people all worked up for some reason). It’s a lot more focused. There’s a suggestion that it’s going to be about history, the future, and morality. It’s a title that’s bubbling with possibilities. People click on that and think, “Hmmm... I wonder which direction this is going to go?”
Please take the time to play around with some sort of headline analyzer. You don’t have to use it every time you write an article, but every now and then you should drop in to make sure you’re getting the most out of your prime writing real estate.
School is back on tomorrow
I’ll get back to a normal work week tomorrow because the kids are going back to school. They had an itinerary for me this morning. My eldest just moved into her own room, so I had a list of tasks to perform (most of them involved power tools). I’m delighted by this to be honest. My girls can always show up with an itinerary of things for me to do for them. I love it. I absolutely love it.
Their decorations are stunning. I feel like I live in a house with two fairies. You walk into their rooms and you’re instantly surrounded by joyous, electric energy. These are the great days.
This week, one of my readers said that my articles on Medium can be a bit too heavy, so I did one that was a little more frivolous. It was an article about surfing YouTube with my daughters in search of videos for Warren Zevon songs. I’m still trying to decide if I should do more articles like that. In the past, I used to sprinkle in a few more “light” articles just to balance out my commentary on how society is devolving into a dystopian nightmare.
Maybe my readers would be better served if I offered the inconsequential articles here on Substack? They certainly don’t perform all that well on Medium. Thoughts?
This is what I meant when I was talking about community, I seriously need to know what you guys think. Please leave a comment below! Until next week…
I like your lighter material, partly because I worry less that you are burning yourself out. You don’t owe me or any reader any bright siding, but passionate disgust fueled by love is more compelling than the endless “U R DOIN IT ALL WRONG” that social media serves up. Maybe it will take time for your lighter pieces to pickup traction?
I agree with the titles part. Too many people write titles like they're book titles. What they need to be, instead, is magazine or newspaper headlines that help a reader decide if that's something they want to read. The Tree, Last Thanksgiving -- those tell me nothing.
As for what to write -- I think no matter what we write some people like it and some people hate it so I just write what shows up and (for me) thank heavens something did because I struggle with dry spells.