Friday, February 6: Bandersnatches
NAMING NAMES
by Steve Steinbock
Welcome to Round Five of the Titular Roundtable.
Guest-blogger Paul (sounds like the name of a rap artist) prodded us with a few questions. I’ll address them, and we’ll see where it goes.
Do you have specific rules for your titles, or do they come about through osmosis?
That’s two separate questions.
Do I have any rules? Yes. A title needs to be somehow relevant to the story, and it must somehow be catchy. Puns are cool, but I say stay away from any pun unless it really is relevant. A double-entendre only works when both interpretations fit the bill.
As to whether they come through osmosis. . . I think it’s more a matter of cold fusion. Or maybe just indigestion.
How much time do you spend on titles?
As little as possible.
Do you always have a title before you begin, or does it arrive during, or after?
I’ll often have a working title before I begin. Sometimes the working title moves in and takes permanent residence.
I’ve heard of stories growing out of titles. An author comes up with a clever title and the story pops right out, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Actually, I’m working on something like that right now. I have a series of related titles and a set of characters. The themes, settings, and situations are borne out of the titles.
How often (if ever) does a title change once you’ve written or rewritten something?
Oh, yes. I have a story about two elderly sisters-in-law. They started out as sisters. That was my working title: The Sisters’ Story. Relevant but hardly catchy. One of the sisters is compulsively tidying everything up, and that became a central theme of the story. I started calling it Clean Up. When the time came to submit the story, I decided Cleaning Up sounded better. I just mailed the story back to the editor having made the changes she suggested, but in the process I changed the title one more time to A Place for Everything.
Fred Dannay (one half of the “Ellery Queen” writing team and the original editor of EQMM) was notorious for changing titles. Many is the story of how Fred changed an author’s clever title to something else. Often the authors admit that Fred’s title was superior to their own. But just as often, Fred changed perfectly good titles to awkward, confusing, and/or irrelevant titles for whatever reason.
I did a story (non-fiction) for Audiofile Magazine about the use of audio programs for foreign language learning. My editor gave it the clever title, “Lost in Translation,” and illustrated it with a photograph of me in a sushi bar surrounded by language tapes. A few years later I did a followup article for the same magazine. I submitted it under the title “Listening in Tongues.” I thought I was brilliant! My editor disagreed. She changed it to “Listening to the World.” Go figure.
That takes care of Paul’s questions. Let’s move on to. . .
Where Do You Find Your Titles?
Martin Edwards, a Liverpool solicitor and occasional visitor to Criminal Brief, actually wrote a story called “Where Do You Find Your Ideas?” He liked it so much that he gave his short story collection the same name. I love it.
For authors having a difficult time with titles, I have three suggestions:
1. Read Shakespeare’s Hamlet
2. Read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and/or Through the Looking Glass
3. Eat lots of chocolate.
The first two are limitless fountains of title ideas. I have a theory that if you take any two, three, four, or five contiguous words from Hamlet you can get a good, workable title out of them. The following is a random selection. Honestly!
The Yet Unknowing World
Lest More Mischance
Accidental Judgment
Casual Slaughters
Unnatural Acts
A Baseness To Write
Some Rights Of Memory
You get the idea.
Regarding Lewis Carroll, just last week I mentioned on this forum that to mark the end of Ed Hoch’s unbroken 36 year stream of stories, EQMM has printed the story “The Vorpal Blade.” That title is based on a throwaway line in Carroll’s throwaway nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.” Here is a selection of book and story titles derived from Lewis Carroll’s books:
“The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party” by Ellery Queen
Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser by George Bagby
Down the Rabbit Hole by Peter Abrahams
The Frumious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain
Night of the Jabberwock by Fredric Brown
Death Through the Looking Glass by Richard Forrest
The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr
The short story anthology Malice in Wonderland by Rufus King
Murder Through the Looking Glass is a title that has been used at least three times, by Craig Rice, Andrew Garve, and Robert George Dean.
And I could list dozens more, but I won’t.
And the chocolate? Osmosis.
Title on!
Not to be nitpicky, but Rice wrote Murder through the Looking Glass under her Michael Venning pen name.
I don’t like Hamlet because it’s full of cliches. (Rimshot.)
I have a suspicion that almost every phrase in WB Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” has been used as a title of something. “The widening gyre.” “Slouching toward Bethlehem.” Etc.
There’s still a lot of ore that can be mined from the Bible. But more often than not, the author’s use of biblical references skew the original meaning (e.g. An Eye for an Eye and The Eye of the Needle).
Great list of potential titles from HAMLET and real ones from ALICE.
Steve, you asked for more examples of Fred Dannay’s title changes. The second story I sold was originally intended as a parody of Cortland Fitzsimmons, so I called it “20,000 Witnesses to Death on the Crimson Hardwood,” but Fred Dannay rightly pointed out nobdy in 1968 remembered Fitzsimmons’s 1930s sports mysteries, but they did remember the boys’ book hero Frank Merriwell. I called the revised version “Frank Merriswell’s Daring One-Hander; or A Hardcourt Mystery,” which Fred changed to “Frank Merriswell’s Greatest Case; or The Daring One-Hander.” I like mine better. I wanted to call my first Philo Vance pastiche “The Talkie Murder Case,” but Fred made it into the more dignified “Austin Murder Case.” I can’t even remember the original title of my first story about umpire Ed Gorgon, but Fred’s retitling (“Diamond Dick”) was inspired. My title for the second Gorgon story (“Guess Who’s Coming To”) I thought was terribly clever, but in retrospect I guess it’s pretty bad; Fred called it “Horsehide Sleuth,” which I don’t really care for either. On the whole, his batting average on title changes was pretty good, but he was far from infallible.
He changed my A KIND OF RETRIBUTION to A DEBT TO BE PAID. His was better. Eleanor Sullivan changed two or three of mine, none for the better. The worst was Chuck Fritsch changing FATHER’S GIRL to MISSING, as bland a title as they come. Mike Shayne MM usually didn’t go in for bland so all I can think is he thought my title implied that people were behaving badly.
Jeff Marks wrote:
You’re correct, Jeff. But she still wrote it, and it’s still a great story. The book has been out of print for decades, and “Michael Venning” never really existed, anyhow. I think she just did two books under that name, right?
(Speaking of titles, Jeff is the author of the cleverly titled Who Was That Lady?, a biography of Craig Rice).
No problem. It’s just that often the books are still located in library systems and bookdealers under the Venning name and not Rice.
I enjoyed all 3 books in that very short lived series. Jethro Hammer was my favorite, but I don’t believe any other books have that same title!
Fritz Leiber (in “Four Ghosts In Hamlet”)suggests a voluntary ban on titles from Macbeth, then lists a bunch taken from just one soliloquy! A recent book “Now All We Need Is A Title” by Andre Bernard tells the story behind a lot of famous book titles.