A Title By Any Other Name

Writing is hard. Titles are harder.

At least they are to me and apparently to a lot of other writers, if the list of bad titles on my Google search are any indication.  The (ahem) interesting titles ranged from poor taste to silly, and from inadvertently offensive to boring.

The font type, size and color of the title on the front cover and spine of a book are meant to catch a reader's eye, but the words are most critical in convincing a browser to become a purchaser.

Ever tried to recommend a book to a fellow reader but you just couldn't remember that title? Maybe the title said nothing about the book or was difficult to pronounce, or just too long. Wonderful stories sometimes get tangled in their titles. The Curious Case of the something something Night? The Potato Pie Society what?   If you can't remember the title, how will your friend who has never seen the cover remember it?

Here are a few books that (thankfully) were saved from their original titles:
 First Impressions changed to...Pride and Prejudice

 Something That Happened  changed to...Of Mice and Men
The Dead Un-Dead  changed to...Dracula
Trimalchio in West Egg  changed to...The Great Gatsby
Atticus changed to...To Kill a Mockingbird

Titles are sure tricky business.  Here are some titles that could have used a second opinion:
Still Stripping After 25 Years (Quilt in a Day) for quilters
Who Cares About Elderly People  A child's book about caring for your elders
Everyone Poops  I used this book for potty-training my kids and it gets the point across, but still...
Are Women Human? an International Dialogue   Just, whatever

Some writers know the title when they begin a manuscript. It comes to them and settles in and is proven out by the story. Good for them! That hasn't been my experience.  If it also hasn't been yours, you might try this:

• Make a word list for your theme - distinctive action words rather than passive, forgettable ones. Does a word jump out at you?
• Write a paragraph about the story, or read through your synopsis to find a meaningful word or phrase that sums it up. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, considering Gone With the Wind was almost titled Tomorrow is Another Day
• Try alliteration or rhyme: Angela's Ashes; Captains Courageous; Sense and Sensibility; Amelia Bedelia
• Give clues as to what your story is about.  Something Wicked This Way Comes; The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks (this one's non-fiction); The Miracles of Santo Fico
• Use a name that's important to the story: Frankenstein; Rebecca; Gilead; Jewel; Matilda
• Use a catchphrase (or part of one), but consider that All's Well That Ends Well was better as War and Peace. 
• Use a phrase from another literary work: For Whom the Bell Tolls; All the King's Men; The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
•  Use a play on words: Tails From the Garage (okay, my daughter used this for her collection of stories about her cat when she was young, but you get the picture)

This is a short list to get you started. Remember that your publisher may change the title, so hold it loosely.
Titles cannot be copyrighted, so it is especially important to do an internet search of the title you have chosen in order to make yours distinctive. Also consider that you may be repeating the title frequently in your marketing efforts, so don't choose one that is a challenge to say.

Do you have a title for your work-in-progress that you would like to share, and perhaps a one-sentence pitch? We would love to hear.




 

Change of Fortune

I was surprised to read the first few words of the opening sentence of Debbie's post on Wednesday: "I learned a new word ..." because that's exactly how I planned to begin this post. I learned a new word ... Great minds? Absolutely. I love Debbie's new word, prevenient, love its implications, especially as it pertains to grace. When I think of God's prevenient grace in my life, think of all the things he kept me from and kept me through, I'm overwhelmed. I mean that in the truest sense of the word. David asks in Psalm 8:4: "What is man that you are mindful of him?" I echo his question, but I tend to personalize it when I ask: Who am I, Lord,  that you are mindful of me? Casting Crowns answers that question in one of my favorite songs, Who Am I? It never fails to move me to tears.

So prevenient was Debbie's new word. Mine is peripety, defined as: A sudden change of fortune or reversal of circumstances. More to the point, it's the hinge on which the reversal turns. I love that word, love how it rolls off the tongue, like serendipity, which is one of the coolest words in our language. While peripety is new to me, I can imagine our own brilliant Dr. Latayne -- and she is brilliant -- using it in everyday conversation. In fact, she's written an excellent book on faith as the hinge that changes everything in the life of Sarah and Abraham: The Hinge of Your History: The Phases of Faith.

I came to know the word peripety through Beth Moore's Bible study on the biblical book of Esther. My daughter Deanne facilitates a women's Bible study at her church, which recently went through the series. Deanne loaned me the set of DVDs with the admonition, "Watch these." So like the dutiful mother I am, I began to watch them. After one or two sessions, I understood why Deanne felt so impressed to recommend them to me. I'm not sure I've ever gone through a Bible study more pertinent to the circumstances of my life than this series on Esther. Two lessons into it I started over again and told my husband we needed to go through it together. We are, and it's speaking to him as deeply as it's speaking to me.

Session six of the study, which covers Esther 6:6-11, is where peripety came into play. Since this post isn't meant to be a Bible study, I won't go into the details, but I highly recommend the series. Seriously.

Among the many areas where peripety applies to my life, I've thought a lot about how it applies to my writing. I've shared before about the long and difficult journey my path to publication took. Long. And Difficult. Twenty years worth. I stood before a brick wall with no doors or windows, no way over or around, when it came to publication. I know many of you can sympathize. And then one day I received a large postcard in the mail advertising the upcoming writers conference at Mount Hermon. I thought, Wow, I would love to go, but it's not possible. I was scheduled to be in Atlanta with my husband that week, to help with a missions conference he was participating in. Tickets bought and paid for, hotel booked. So maybe another time. That's what I told myself, and yet I couldn't throw the postcard away. I left it on the kitchen island, where it sat for several weeks, where I was drawn to it over and over again.

Then one evening Rick picked up the postcard, which I hadn't even mentioned to him, and said, "I think you should go to this." I said, "I'd love to, but it's the week we're to be in Atlanta." Without hesitation he said, "No, I think you should go. I'll take Mindy (our other daughter) to Atlanta." And so I went right in and registered. I can't tell you how excited I was, or how nervous. I applied for a spot in the first fiction writers' critique group with Gayle Roper and submitted my chapter to her online. There was room for only 12 writers, and this was less than 3 weeks before the conference. A long shot? Yes indeed. Surely all the spots had been filled. I couldn't believe it when I received an email from Gayle late one night saying I was accepted. Another writer named Kathleen Popa was in the group. Our friendship began even before we met at Mount Hermon as we read each other's chapters in advance of the conference and recognized a kindred spirit in one another.

While I was at the conference I met editors who liked my writing, whose encouragement gave new life to my hopes and dreams. While it was still 2 years before I received a contract, it was the event that caused a reversal in my circumstances, and that postcard was the hinge.

Peripety.

To this day I don't know why I received it, or how in the world I got on their mailing list. I just know the remarkable difference it made in my life. It was the first link in a chain of events through which I've been so blessed. I met an editor who took my book to committee ... who offered a contract ... which helped me sign with an agent ... who had the idea of bringing a group of literary authors together to blog ... which put Bonnie, Debbie, Katy, Latayne, Patti and me together, authors from different states, different countries in fact, most of whom didn't know each other ... out of which Novel Matters was born ... which forged a deep and important friendship between 6 women of like mind ... and brought you into my life.

Peripety,

Not only is it an important element in the lives we live, it's an important device in the fiction we write. And to maximize its impact the pivot point of the peripety should be a seemingly insignificant event, rather than a point of highest dramatic tension. Like me receiving that postcard. Which changed everything. As it says in the Esther study guide, "A peripeteia swiftly turns a routine sequence of events into a story worth telling" (attributed to Boyd A. Luter and Barry C. Davis, Focus on the Bible). And isn't that the goal of every novelist, to write a story worth telling?

The term peripety is generally linked to dramatic literature, such as works by Shakespeare, but by definition every good novel should have a "sudden change of fortune or reversal of circumstances," whether negative or positive. How might peripety be applied to: David Copperfield, The Great Gatsby, or Lord of the Rings? Where does the sudden change or reversal of circumstances occur, and what is the hinge that precipitates it? What are your ideas?

The Age We Read

If you asked me what kind of book would have a profound effect on me at this stage of my life, one of my last choices would have been a book about the Jazz Age in the 1920s. After all, I took a whole semester of F. Scott Fitzgerald in college (only because it was the only lit class offered during the semester that I could fit in my crammed class schedule) and I hated it.

So. . . I buy books on tape, whatever’s available at the time, at a local charity thrift store. (Fortunately for me, someone with literary tastes like mine donates regularly.) So I ran through the Grisham and the Sharon Ewell Foster and the Cornwell and the Hillerman. So all that was left was The Great Gatsby. So I began to listen to it because it was narrated by KJV Bible narrator Alexander Scourby.

When I read Fitzgerald in my twenties, I was newly and happily married. I couldn’t muster up sympathy for alcoholics who danced in Manhattan’s fountains, years before my mother was even born. I couldn’t relate to the angst of those people with their marital problems that bled over into their writing. After all, my life was wonderful – and not only that, I had a whole lifetime ahead of me.

But now I am myself a novelist, and writing about issues that destroy people’s souls, that wash hope beyond the most distant shores, issues that demand re-evaluation because they determine where people will spend a mobius loop of eternity. Issues which demand our attention because ignoring them can put us in a position in which it can be too late, irretrievably too late.

For the first time, the description at the end of The Great Gatsby made sense to my soul:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I am a different person than when I first read that, years ago.

And now I think that I shall never recover from those words; the simplicity, the finality, the truthfulness of those words.

Story World Matters: Part II

The takeaway from Part 1 of this series was that the world your characters live in is a manifestation of those characters. So, if we create a story world that reveals our characters, does that mean it should rain every time the hero is upset?

Please no.

Characters are complex—meaning they are layered, sometimes contrary, and able to hide truth from themselves. Story world personifies the complexity of your characters over the course of the novel. It’s the ground they stand on, and the wind up their kilt. It’s the dark alley of oppression, and warm house of acceptance. The buildings, weather, land mass, and even the technology inside the story world is organically linked to the characters in such a way that it reveals meaning, themes, and plot.

For example, in my completed manuscript A Girl Named Fish, my hero, Joan, lives on a fictional dystopian island. The story structure is fairy tale, so that means the island is Joan’s kingdom. I emphasize this point by giving Joan and her husband, Leif, an apartment above the chandlery shop they own. This serves as Joan’s ‘high tower’, the place in which she eavesdrops on the world without fully engaging. I crafted a scene near the beginning of the novel in which Joan stands in front of her open window and overhears two women on the street below talking about her. Later, when a girl calling herself Fish enters this rarified space, it is altered. Near the end of the novel, there is another scene where Joan overhears two women talking about her, but the high tower has been transformed.

My island in A Girl Named Fish is fictional, but novels often borrow a real location as their setting. The difference is, when you borrow a real place, let’s say Las Vegas, you make it into your Las Vegas. You craft it’s places and give meaning to it’s buildings, attractions, and streets. It’s motels are as corrupt and gritty as your undercover cop hero, or casinos as glamorous and sparkling as your beauty pageant character, or its neighborhoods as cloistered and manicured as your falsely perfect characters who allow themselves to be blinded by the high fences around their houses that keep truth out.

You take the real place and mold it into a familiar, yet utterly unique place that pulses, shifts, and changes with your characters. You create a world that is a revelation. The city itself reveals a moral truth of humanity. And yes, you do this even with historical fiction. Every place in history has a few nooks and crannies you can realistically use, bend, invent to create the exact story world you need to tell the story.

How?

Remember the adage Fiction is conflict? That isn’t just plot advice. It’s important to crafting all aspects of fiction, including story world. Your story world expresses the conflicts between characters in physical ways.

This means that in order to create an organic story world, you need to understand the web of conflict between characters. In simple stories like romance novels, there is a hero (the POV character) and an opponent (the person the POV character falls in love with), with the rest of the cast of characters there to make tea when the POV character cries. More complex stories are ones that have multiple characters in opposition to the hero and to each other. Every character is a reflection a different way of understanding the hero’s moral issue. Your story world will reflect the conflict.

For example, in The Great Gatsby, there is an initial conflict between the open spaces of the Midwest, and the elegant closed-ness of the city, including its mansions. There is the East Egg (established wealth), and the West Egg (new money). Gatsby is newly rich by illegal means, and his home is gaudy and ill appointed compared to the homes of the less recently rich. Later, the mansions add layers of conflict by introducing the gas station where we find Tom’s mistress. And New York City, by the end, has morphed into a beast, a monster, green and vile. All of these aspects of story world combine to support and diagram the deeper conflict found in the novel. The conflict between people, ideas, systems, and ideologies are all manifest in the story world.

Notice how the physical world in The Great Gatsby not only reflects conflict between characters, but also conflict of values. The values held by your hero (more about that in part 3), and how they are in opposition to the values held by other characters and the systems that entrap each one. Your story world supports and manifests the various conflicts of values found in the story.

In Alice Hoffman’s epic novel The Dovekeepers, the story world is Masada, King Herod’s abandoned desert fortress where 960 Jews chose to die by their own hands rather than be taken hostage by Rome. The novel is a study in conflict. Three women come to Masada from different places (open spaces) and work together in the dovecotes (closed spaces). Masada is a fortress against the gathering Roman army on the desert floor below, and inside Masada there are opulent rooms where leaders reside, and cramped, dark stables where poor families live. And there are hidden places deep within the mountain where magic spells are pronounced and women give birth to illegitimate children in secret. Each space inside Masada highlights the conflict between characters (the cave on the side of the mountain where the Essenes hide away from the “unclean” Jews above, the cistern that runs nearly dry, the dovecotes where a woman and a captured slave are thrown together. All these aspects combine to highlight the shifting alliances and increasingly dangerous conflicts.

The spaces in The Dovekeepers reflect the conflict of values found among diverse yet devout people. They highlight the religious, economic, class, and ideological conflicts, and hold them in tension with the terrible deeds that take place in the open (the desert) in the name of survival.

The general rule is the greater the conflict between characters, the smaller the space should be that contains the conflict. Great stories always have their great, final battle take place inside the smallest spaces in the story. This works best when the entire story before the final battle has made structural use of story world to help tell the story. (Don’t be confused by the term “battle” this refers to whatever form major conflict takes, it doesn’t refer exclusively to combat or fighting.)

The take home is that your story world is the physical manifestation of your character’s conflicts.

Thoughts? Also, feel free to ask any questions or for clarification. I’ll do my best to engage with your ideas and ponderings and together, we might come up with something helpful.

Yawpy Endings

In Katie’s wonderful post on Monday, she encouraged us to look for “yawp” in novels—but, more importantly, to have the courage to create yawp.

I’d like to drill down on that concept a bit. It seems to me that courageous and inventive writing has to both sustain yawp through the novel, but must also to pull together elements at the end for a final punch.

Sometimes a good novel whittles away all the rest of the plot to end with a satisfying distillation of themes in the book. I’ve used this quote before, but I love it, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

Contrast that to the ending of The Great Gatsby. Instead of using a closeup as in Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s verbal camera pulls way back and looks at the history of the setting, zooms in on the main character of the book, and then ends with a still shot of a universal truth:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Both these novels are courageous and yawpy. What other novels can you offer which had a strong yawpy ending?