Title
MidnightMuse said:
It's good to know I'm not alone. I'll come up with an idea before the title, about half the time, but until I have a title -- and one that I'm in love with -- I can't even write the first line. It'll make me crazy sometimes, knowing how the story should start, and end, but be completely unable to begin writing it until "that perfect title" comes to me.
Go figure.
Title first is something I learned from Ray Bradbury. And in his wonderful book "Zen in the Art of Writing," he says a couple of things about titles.
When talking about his first real, non-imitative story, he writes:
"I wrote the title "The Lake" on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up."
And: "But along through those years I began to make lists of titles, to
put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations,
finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my
way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the
top of my skull."
A bit later he writes
: "But back to my lists. And why go back to them? Where am I leading you? Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one,
similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well
help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found
me.
I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit
down to write a long prose-poem-essay on it. Somewhere along about the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose poem would turn into a story. Which is to say that a character suddenly appeared and said, "That's me"; or, "That's an idea I like!" And the character would then
finish the tale for me.
It began to be obvious that I was learning from my lists of
nouns, and that I was further learning that my characters would
do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads,
which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.
I looked at my list, saw SKELETON, and remembered the
first artworks of my childhood. I drew skeletons to scare my girl
cousins. I was fascinated with those unclothed medical displays
of skulls and ribs and pelvic sculptures. My favorite tune was
"'Tain't No Sin, To Take Off Your Skin, and Dance Around in
Your Bones."
Remembering my early artwork and my favorite tune, I ambled
into my doctor's office one day with a sore throat. I touched my
Adam's apple, and the tendons on each side of my neck, and asked
for his medical advice.
"Know what you're suffering from?" asked the doc.
"What?"
"Discovery of the larynx!" he crowed. "Take some aspirin.
Two dollars, please!"
Discovery of the larynx! My God, how beautiful! I trotted
home, feeling my throat, and then my ribs, and then my medulla
oblongata, and my kneecaps. Holy Moses! Why not write a story
about a man who is terrified to discover that under his skin, inside
his flesh, hidden, is a symbol of all the Gothic horrors in history—
a skeleton!
The story wrote itself in a few hours."
And
: "I remembered my dog, lost for days, coming home late on a winter night with snow and mud and leaves in his pelt. And the stories began to
burst, to explode from those memories, hidden in the nouns, lost
in the lists."
At any rate, it works much the same for me. I make the same sort of lists, and the lists become titles, and the titles become stories. I skip the prose poem part, but the characters, the idea, the story, the plot, the theme, everything is right there in the title.
I started with nouns and wrote "The Parachute," my first thousand dollar sale for a short story. Then I sometimes expanded the titles. How can you write a title like "A Few Miles South of Nowhere" and not have a story waiting to be written? It went on and on.
A title pulls things from my head that I had no idea were there. I can write all day without a title, and not have a paragraph worth keeping, let alone a whole story. But if I write down a title, one I like, it always comes with a story attached.
- I think I will have more ideas for a title after the WIP is actually finished.
) I'm one of those anal retentive people who thinks a title is necessary to write the story. I'm glad to know that isn't true, because I'm now about 20,000 words into my novel. I was getting a bit scared I didn't have a proper name for my WIP yet.