FUNDAMENTALS

Titles

Titles are often the last thing that gets fastened down in a piece of writing, usually by an editor. That doesn’t have to be.

Writers ought to work with titles from the start, because a good title tells what the story is about, and finding what the story is about is the most difficult task of the writer. So start with a title, even if it is a provisional one, just to give you some direction. Editors may have better ideas, so be open to them.

Some titles have the ring of slogans: The Right Stuff, The Perfect Storm, The World is Flat.

Others have mystery: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, In Cold Blood, A Bright Shining Lie, Death of a Poet, Crime and Punishment.

Emblematic: The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage.

The title might contain the theme. After her husband died suddenly, Joan Didion kept thinking he was going to walk through the door again. She called her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.

It might be about an action: Black Hawk Down, A Civil Action, “The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” A Farewell to Arms, The Making of a Quagmire.

Sometimes the story is about a place: Hiroshima, A River Runs Through It, Bad Land, The Great Plains, City of Fallen Angels, Coming into the Country.

More often the story is about a character: The Orchid Thief, Fathers and Sons.

Some stories are so much about a central character that the name becomes the title: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamozov, “Maizie.”

Consider the case of the film director Woody Allen: “He made some movies, but when he was 40, he felt like a failure. So he decided to try a new kind of film, which he called Anhedonia. It was several hours long, and it had almost no plot. He ended up cutting out almost everything except scenes with Diane Keaton, who played the love interest. So he named the movie after her character, Annie Hall (1977), and it won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best actress. “(Writer’s Almanac, December 1, 2008.)

Imagine Allen’s chance of success with a title like Anhedonia. He had to discover that his theme was not an idea but a character.

A student wrote about how her father left the war in Laos and came to America. For a long time we called the story, “Leaving Laos.” But in her final draft, she found a title that resonates and has mystery: “Warrior.” What the story was really about was why he was fighting and how he left that identity behind.

--Michael Berryhill

BEYOND THE BASICS