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

regardless? Perhaps. Perhaps enough readers would have picked up the book wordlessly and carried it to the cash register. Perhaps others would have asked for the latest Ludlum novel if intimidated by its title.

But why take chances?

4. DON'T MAKE THE TITLE DO THE STORY'S JOB. Years ago, when I spent a year reading slush at a literary agency, it sometimes seemed to me as though a full forty percent of the stories I read were entitled As the Twig Is Bent. Another thirty-five percent were called So Grows the Tree.

Doubtless I exaggerate. But I've noted in this year's contest entries that a lot of new writers still fashion titles from tired proverbs. The problem is twofold. First of all, the titles thus formed have a trite quality to them; more to the point, they pull the punch of the story by telling the reader in advance what conclusion he is meant to draw from it. It's tiresome enough to have a story's moral spelled out, but when it's spelled out ahead of time, why bother reading the story at all?

Other stories get defused when too much information is given in the title, often in the name of quaintness. The Day Jimmie Jeff Rayburn Drove Clear to Harrisonville for the Papers might be an example of this sort of thing.

When I first started publishing short stories, my titles tended to be pedestrian and unmemorable. In recent years I've been happier with my ability to come up with something striking. Sometimes I can see the title I would have used, had I approached it with a little less imagination. I did a story about a gas station holdup, for instance, that I once would have been pleased to call Highway Robbery. Instead the title I used was Nothing Short of Highway Robbery; it's more arresting and memorable, and it fits the story better.

My favorite title is Burglars Can't Be Choosers, and I've never doubted that it contributed to the sale of the first Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery. It was a neat enough play on a familiar phrase, and it managed to convey a sense of the book, that it would offer a lighthearted look at criminous matters. Once I hit on that title it seemed to have been the inevitable choice from the beginning.

But I almost missed it. I didn't have a title when I was readying the first fifty or sixty pages for submission to Random House. While proofreading, I happened on the phrase in one of Bernie's interior monologues. I didn't even remember having written it, but fortunately I was able to recognize a good title when it bit me, so I quick-typed out a title page.

Series titles, incidentally, constitute a special problem. On the one hand, they provide an opportunity for you to let the reader know that the books are indeed volumes in a series. A certain amount of uniformity it thus desirable. Too much uniformity, though, and it can become very difficult for a reader to remember if he's read a particular book or not. Consider the Matt Helm titles?The Betrayers, The Ambushers, The Ravagers, etc. How does the mind keep them separated?

John D. MacDonald found an answer in the Travis McGee books, using a different color in each title but otherwise making no effort at uniformity. Nightmare in Pink, A Tan and Sandy Silence, The Scarlet Ruse?the titles fit the individual books, with only the memorable color word providing series continuity.

After my second novel about Evan Tanner was published with the title The Canceled Czech, I decided to try for similar word-play in future volumes. Tanner #3, dealing with romance in Latvia, was submitted as Letts Fall in Love, with an alternative title of The Lettish Tomatoes. It was published as Tanner's Twelve Swingers. Tanner #4, concerning a sexually unsuccessful Siamese, was proudly handed in as The Scoreless Thai. Fawcett published it as Two for Tanner, and I decided the hell with it.

All of which suggests that perhaps we shouldn't attach too much importance to titles. Publishers not only change bad ones, but they're sometimes just as quick to change good ones. On several occasions Hollywood studios have (a) bought a book for its title, (b) scrapped the story and written a wholly original screenplay, and (c) then changed the title. Publishers rarely go that far, but they're capable of bizarre behavior.

Back in the late fifties, science-fiction writer Randall P. Garrett had a standing assignment to deliver ten thousand words a month to Amazing Stories. Each month he submitted three or four pieces of fiction, each with a title and with one of his regular pen names. Each month, sure as death and taxes, Amazing's editor would change all Randy's titles and all of his pen names.

Randy decided he shouldn't bother being creative if his titles weren't going to be used anyway, and that he might as well enjoy himself. His agent's files can testify that, over the next year or so, he wrote and submitted and sold the following works of fiction: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, and so on. Nobody at Amazing Stories ever cracked a smile. The checks came in, invoiced accordingly, and the stories?titles and pen names changed?appeared in due course.

Which reminds me?I'm not sure why?of the perhaps apocryphal story of the reporter who cornered a Hollywood studio boss for an interview. Pardon me, sir, but my name is Henry Gorgenplatz, and I?

Don't worry