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"What's it called?"

17 April, 2003

I find it very difficult to seriously work on a story, essay, or article, before I come up with a title. I may change the title, and I often do several times during the revision, but I can't get typing along at speed until I have a relatively satisfying title on the piece.

I've been aware of this little quirk for a long time. I have wondered if it's because I started out writing on typewriters, since it's inconvenient to go back and add a title to the top of a physical piece of paper if you didn't leave adequate space. I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. If I have a clear enough idea about what I want to write to put a title on it, then it's less likely I'll waste a lot of time revising. There will be some revision, but not as much.

In journalistic circles good headline writing used to be considered a fine art. An editor who could quickly compose headline that not only summed up the store, but very nicely filled the space available, were highly prized. Desktop publishing software began diminishing that value. When you can select a headline and shrink it a point or two--or substitute a condensed or expanded version of the headline font until it fits--being pithy, witty, and possessing a varied vocabulary were no longer as important. The situation has gotten worse as the publishing world has expanded into the world wide web.

Don't get me wrong, my inner Thomas Jefferson is ecstatically turning back-flips over the semi-democraticization of "publishing" that the web enables. More people being able to make their voices heard is, in the long run, in the best interests of us all.

But it comes with a price. It's not just headlines that have become more prosaic and wordy. Fewer book titles are elegant and to the point. Everywhere you see publishers slapping longer and longer sub-titles onto books. What Liberal Media? is a great title, for example. It describes the contents of the book perfectly, catches the attention, and gives you a hint about what the tone and attitude of the writing will be. Why, then, did the publisher feel the need to add the subtitle, "The Truth About Bias and the News"?

If Hemingway were writing today, he could never get The Sun Also Rises published without a synopsis screaming just beneath the title. And what would it be? "Four lost souls pursue the unattainable in a world between wars?" "A tale of the unattainable?" "Regret and loss beneath the Spanish sun?" Or maybe the cover would proclaim, "The Sun Also Rises: The temperature's rising, but Jack can't..."

There are some books that when I look at the front cover, I feel like I don't need to open the book, they've already told me more than I want to know. More than once I've found books that have two subtitles. It's just sad, that the publishers feel the need to squeeze more and more information onto the front.

It was bad enough when they started designing book covers with the author's name set in gigantic type, while the title of the book was hidden somewhere below. At least in that case you could point out that knowing the name of the author isn't a bad thing. But even that was only the beginning. The very worst example I saw was a paperback in the fantasy section of a bookstore. The top of the cover proclaimed "From the publisher of Robert E. Howard's Conan," with Howard's name and Conan in the truly gigantic type. It went on to say, "A tale of mystery and heroism, <title>, by <author's name>" with the font getting smaller and smaller as you went down.

That's right, it was barely in the same sub-genre as the Conan stories. It didn't have anything else to do with Conan or Mr. Howard. It was one of the most cynical marketing decisions I had ever witnessed.

I may lament the decline of the witty title or headline. But I don't have to admit defeat. I'm going to keep choosing titles for things I write the way I always have: keep it simple, keep it honest, and try to give it just a bit of poetry.

Because, although a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, if you plastered it over with a misleading and off-putting package, not as many people would take a whiff.