Funny story about how I came to write my latest article: "Let's Get it Started," on the craft of titling, is the main feature in the current issue of Writers' Journal. (The article is not available online, but you can pick up a copy of the magazine in bookstores, or else here.)
See, I couldn't come up with a title for my graduate thesis, a collection of five stories. I was stumped. While the connections among my stories was clear to me, it didn't seem to be the stuff of pithy titles; there were no common characters, or landscapes, or even centuries. I brainstormed a list of about 30 possible titles with another writer friend of mine, and you know what? They were lame. And I complained about why the hell nobody talks to writers about titling in any thoughtful way. In five semesters in my grad program, and nine semesters in an undergrad writing program, it never came up. Which is weird, because titling is as much of a craft point as anything else. But too often it's treated by writers as an afterthought. For myself, I often retreated behind safe and nondescript nouns. Consider the not-so-memorable fictional effort: "The Daughter." (Though, to be sure, the noun title is sometimes the perfect choice. You'll have to read the article for details. Or, you know, ask me.)
So, what does a writer do when she feels her lack of a skill? Figure out what other writers do and learn from it. Said writer friend of mine and I put together titles that work really well for the fiction it presents. On the table were To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, as well as Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories and Susan Minot's Lust and Other Stories.
And we talked about why they worked.
And, still being a student in my final semester, obliged to turn in at least 12 annotation papers to my supervisor on craft points, I poured out my newly inspired thoughts into a triple-annotation (that is, I turned in something three times the normal length).
And my supervisor, Steven Schwartz, said my annotations are voiced a lot like craft articles, and maybe I should think about sending them out.
And I did.
And here we are.
"Let's Get It Started" begins like this:
Why do so many writers stink at titles? It
seems that many titles aren't chosen so much as they are a point of retreat.
While 'simple' is not an inherent evil in the art of titling, copping-out is. It's as if we've spent so much time
on our stories or novel or poems, we haven't got a drop of inspiration left for
title brainstorming. Which is unfortunate, because failure to use a good title
equates into passing on the opportunity to fill out stories, to amp up the
reader's experience of the text, or even to have our stories read at all.
We can do better.
And
the most efficient way to grasp the wide range of titling techniques, it seems
to me, is with a map of possibilities.
I go on to write out the implication of different titling strategies for the work at hand. For example:
3. The Inverted Title
In a neat syntactical shift, the Inverted Title draws more power than the plain-English way of saying the same thing. While it's common for the Inverted Title to feature an adjective-noun structure shifted into a noun-adjective, other possibilities abound.
Why choose the Inverted Title? It's memorable, first of all. Also, if you want to elevate your text into the realm of archetype, this is a good way to do it. Take John Coltrane's album, A Love Supreme (okay, it's not literature, but it works just the same, doesn't it?). Coltrane's title implies not a particular supreme love between individuals, but a greater state of love, an archetype of which we might all taste a bit. Coltrane's Inverted Tile isn't merely a snazzy trick to stand out among other titles; it actually sharpens the listener's understanding of his music.
Another way the Inverted Title facilitates how we approach a text is by shifting the point of emphasis. For example, in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the Inverted Title emphasizes not the mythological character himself, but his state of being. This titling strategy, then, adds movement to what otherwise would've been flat. The Unbound Prometheus, anyone? Please.
Examples:
Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Oh yes, and my fiction thesis? I called it "Five Stories of Wishful Thinking." To be numerically modified when I finish the full collection: "Twelve Stories of Wishful Thinking."
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