Giving Good Headline

...a dispatch from bewilderness

In my first life, we gave good headline hour by hour, show by show, screen by screen. Transforming staggering numbers of stories with nothing in common into crisp little sound bites that contained 26 letters that tripped off the tongue.

Writers working in English use 26 letters to spell an infinite mix of meltdowns, shutdowns, breakdowns, send-ups, screw-ups, shake-ups, break-ups, takeovers, makeovers, close-ups, cover-ups, con jobs, nut jobs that run the gamut from A-Z.

We deployed and re-deployed words into combat zones a few inches wide. We coupled and uncoupled clauses, phrases, syllables. We put words through the ringer and rolled them out. We were connoisseurs of synonyms, surgeons of statements, carved into requisite character counts.

But now?

In a piece for The New York Times, the writer Jami Attenberg, said, “There’s a comfort in reading memoir. Whatever outlandish or terrible events befall the main character, we know that in the end he or she is going to be essentially OK. The narrator has at least gotten her act together enough to publish the book.”

This doesn’t apply when you’re my age. My former agents fired me due to disability. Mine. The book(s) may not be published and I may not be OK. To achieve pre-posthumous publication, I must acquire a new agent who believes in my work. I must also be fierce, funny, broader in scope, slimmer of hip, longer of leg, smoother of skin, and a few decades younger, too.