Going For the Title

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I just finished the first draft a new short story about a young woman who misses out on the Summer of Love because she has to edit her ailing Dad’s grade-Z monster movie. It’ll be some time before the story is submission-ready, but I already love my title: “The Vampire Lizards of Doctor X“.

That got me thinking about the importance of the title in fiction writing.

From Terry Rossio:

Ted and I were listening to a pitch once from a friend of ours, Ron, an aspiring filmmaker. He had an idea that was pretty good. Really good, in fact — we could tell because we were both getting that slightly jealous “I wish I’d thought of that” feeling. Where you start coming up with your own cool ways to execute the idea, as if it were yours. “So, what’s the title?” I asked.
“I really, really like the title,” Ron said. He took a breath and proclaimed with great relish, “It’s called SILLY GOOSE.”
Ted and I looked at each other. Imagine the high-pitched cartoon sound of something plummeting earthward from a great height. We’d felt we’d been standing on solid creative ground, but then looked down and saw there was nothing beneath us. We knew his promising concept would be dead in the water as long as it was saddled with that title.

Titles can do many things. They can promise. A novel called The Old Man and The Sea will presumably contain both. Alice will presumably at some point be in Wonderland. And in Death of A Salesman it’s probably advisable not to get too attached to the salesman. (One of the manifold problems with the movie Monster A-Go-Go is that the movie lacks both a monster and a-go-go.) Titles can also inspire wonder. Written on the Body could be about a lot of things, but it’s suggestive of sensuality. “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” provokes both terror and curiosity, because it’s hard to know how literally we should take it. A Long Days Journey Into Night lets me know someone’s heading toward a reckoning, or toward oblivion, and the balance of opposites lends intrigue. Slaughterhouse Five implies institutionalized mass murder, while The Spy Who Came In From the Cold makes us think about everything coming in from the cold could mean: getting out of the cold war, out of the cold world…

So getting the title right is key. It’s the key to being remembered. It’s the key to word-of-mouth. Until you’ve got one, you’re not ready to write, and once you’ve got a good one, you have to kill yourself to make the rest of the pieces as good as the title.

Rossio again:

As a final illustration of the power of a title, do the following exercise:
Imagine you’ve been given an assignment and have to write a screenplay, based solely on an assigned title. Forget the actual films the following titles represent. Actually try to imagine the sort of film you’d write if you sat down and worked from the following: BACK TO THE FUTURE, GHOSTBUSTERS, FLATLINERS, BODY HEAT, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, RISKY BUSINESS, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, TRUE LIES, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING.
Man, if you had any of these titles, you’d have no choice. You’d be forced to write a classic film!

What are your favorite titles? What do they make you think about? If you write, what’s the best title you’ve ever written? Play in comments. That’s what they’re for.

Townbuilding

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Literary fiction writers don’t usually have to do quite as much world building as their science fiction and fantasy colleagues. We work mostly with existing locations, either past or present. Still, some of us feel the pull of building a place of our own, like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Fitzgerald’s West and East Egg, Wilder’s Grover’s Corners, or Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or my own Menominee Falls, Michigan. So what follows are a few tips on how to build a town of your own.

1. Remember: Geography is Destiny.

Mountain towns differ from seaside towns. Towns on rivers differ from towns in the desert. Towns off the main highway differ from those twenty minutes from a major city. Towns on a border with another country differ from those far from them. Geography dictates a great deal of our politics, economics, and culture, so this is obviously the most important decision you have to make.

2. Consider what the town lives on.

Towns exist for a reason. Some are little more than a gas station and a restaurant called
“Eat”, but most do something. They farm. They have a cement plant. They ship logs around the country. They mine. They suck in the tourists because some writer who’d never been there went and set a bestselling vampire series in their boring little burg–not that I’m thinking of any place in particular.

Also, remember that the economy changes over time. Maybe the town was once a mining center, but when the price of the mineral bottomed out, the town hit a decline until the highway was widened. Then it became a bedroom community for tech workers in the city who like to hike the hills on weekends.

From this, you can actually determine a great deal about your characters. Maybe they’ve been here all along and have a hard time relating to the newcomers, even though they depend on their money. Or maybe they’re newcomers and they rub up against the resentments of townies who still run a lot of things. I’m not going to go full on Marxist and insist that material conditions dictate all social relationships, but they do dictate a lot. So the economy of the town, and it’s history, have to be considered.

3. What’s the religious makeup of the town? Is it pluralistic, or does one faith dominate?

I spent six years in a town that was 75% Mormon and about 20% Catholic–the Catholic contingent consisted mostly of Polish miners and their descendants (see tip #2)–and believe me, religion mattered a lot. At one point, I avoided a fight because I happened to recognize the kid who wanted to beat me up from a Mass I attended. The Mormons ran the town, natch, and because so much of social life was threaded through a church that those of us lacking a recommend couldn’t access, my guess is that a lot of business, government, and career connections passed through there as well. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s just the way of things in a town dominated by a single faith. Those on the outside are made to feel it, while those on the inside can’t understand why the outsiders think they’re so privileged.

If it’s a pluralistic town, are there any small but loud faiths that tend to monopolize the conversation? Are any of the faiths in decline? Are new ones growing? Economic changes bring new people in sometimes, and those changes bring conflict. At the very least, it’ll be in the air as your characters pursue their goals.

These are just a few of the decisions you have to make. There are a thousand others. For a special challenge, try creating a fictional city. I don’t remember the last time someone did that outside of comic books, and I’d love to see what some of our best writers could do with one.

So tell me about your fictional town.

ABC May Not Be Quite So Easy As 123

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I learned early on in college that I didn’t have what it took to be a professional in math and science, but the material still fascinates me:

On August 31, 2012, Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.

The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades.

Then Mochizuki walked away. He did not send his work to the Annals of Mathematics. Nor did he leave a message on any of the online forums frequented by mathematicians around the world. He just posted the papers, and waited.

Read the whole thing. If you can verify Mochizuki’s proof, or even explain how it works in conventional math speak, do so in comments, will you?