Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

Mitchell's novel owed a measure of its enormous popular success to its title change, and to maintain that Tomorrow Is Another Day wouldn't have sold ten thousand copies.

I'm not so sure that's true. When a book has enough going for it, it seems capable of finding its audience with or without a strong title. When it doesn't, the most intriguing title in the world won't add up to impressive sales figures.

But I do think it's safe to say that Gone With the Wind is a better title than Tomorrow Is Another Day, and that the superior title contributed to the effectiveness of the book's advertising and promotion campaign and enabled it to find its audience faster and with more immediate impact.

Fair enough.

Now the tricky question. Why is Gone With the Wind a better title than Tomorrow Is Another Day?

One is tempted to reply as any number of musicians are said to have done when pressed for a definition of jazz. If you have to ask, they said, you'll never know. In other words, one ought to be able to grasp intuitively the intrinsic superiority of GWTW to TIAD. The one is lively, provocative, compelling. The other is tired, humdrum, prosaic.

On the other hand, the publishing industry has known for years the only honest definition of a good title. A good title, you see, is the name of a best-selling book.

Peyton Place, for instance, is a terrific title. It's even managed to become a part of the language. Without Grace Metalious's novel, however, it's nothing much more than three syllables' worth of alliteration and meter. Because the book happened to sell like Geiger counters in Harrisburg, the title promptly became a household word. A bandwagon effect helped this process along; for several years every faintly steamy book set in a small town was bally-hooed as another Peyton Place, and this did the original novel immeasurable good.

Is The Exorcist a good title? I certainly wouldn't have thought so in advance of the book's publication. I doubt most of the public knew what the word meant. But if it was a bad title, it doesn't seem to have harmed sales much.

How about The Other? If there's any merit whatsoever to that title I'd be pleased to have it explained to me. It's absolutely flat. It doesn't linger in the mind. You get no sense from it of what the book's about, or even of what type of book you're dealing with. Nor is there a mystery in the title intriguing enough to make you pick up the book and find out what the title means. Yet the book certainly sold well.

Is Twins a good title? Or The Thorn Birds? Or The Shining? How about Coma, perhaps the first novel ever named for what it induces? What makes a good title, anyway? And how do you go about picking one for your own story or novel?

First let's place the whole question in perspective. The title you give your manuscript is very likely the least important factor in determining whether or not it sells. A really sensational title may well predispose an editor in favor of your script, but it won't do a thing for you if your work doesn't live up to its promise. Similarly, while a weak title may lessen the enthusiasm with which an editor approaches your material, it won't keep him from being receptive to a good piece of writing; he certainly knows that the title can always be changed.

That said, here are some random thoughts on this whole business of titles.

1. A TITLE SHOULD BE MEMORABLE. I've been reading entries in the WD short-story contest. While no title has yet made a bad story good or a good story bad, I've been struck again this year by the high proportion of singularly dull label titles. Entry after entry passes across my desk with titles like The Dog or The Pen or The Teacher or An Autumn Afternoon or Marilyn or The Affair or?but that's enough, isn't it? These titles are flat and not terribly interesting. They don't promise much. They don't whet the appetite, and they should.

2. A TITLE SHOULD FIT THE BOOK OR STORY THAT FOLLOWS IT. When you've written a certain type of material, the title should indicate as much. If you call your book Gunfight at Rio Lobo, most people are going to leap to the conclusion that it's a western. If it's not a western, that's probably not the best possible title for it?even if there is a central incident in the book involving a shootout at a place called Rio Lobo.

A couple of years ago Charles McGarry wrote a novel of suspense and intrigue called The Secret Lovers. The title was supposed to mean that the principal characters?spies and bureaucrats?had a love of secrets. That's fine if you've got a little miniature salesman attached to each copy of the book to explain what the title means. In the absence thereof, a lot of folks assumed McGarry had written a Harlequin Romance.

3. WATCH OUT FOR UNPRONOUNCEABLE WORDS. Robert Ludlum's titles are always carefully chosen and invariably combine a distinctive proper name and a noun?The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper, The Matarese Circle. One book was very nearly entitled The Wolfsschanze Covenant, until an informal survey revealed that a lot of people were by no means confident of their ability to pronounce Wolfsschanze correctly. As The Holcroft Covenant, the book made its way to the top of the bestseller list. Would it have done so