ENTITLEMENT PROGRAM

by James Lincoln Warren

I have a little machine in my head that generates titles. It can be somewhat capricious, but usually it follows certain rules as strict as any algorithm. That’s because not just any phrase is suitable for a title, and as much as we might like some titles and dislike others, titles must be first and foremost functional.

A title is really nothing but a label you stick on a story, not any different from a printed slip below a butterfly pinned to a card identifying it as a Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucas). Labels must accurately describe and identify the things they are attached to. Assigning a title to a story is the act of naming, one of the most important and human of all possible acts.

The earliest titles were bare descriptions: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad (The Story of Ilium, or Troy), The Odyssey (The Story of Odysseus), and especially The Holy Bible (The Sacred Book). The first author I’m aware of who went beyond simply naming his works after the principal character was Shakespeare: alongside “Henry V” and “Hamlet” you find “All’s Well that Ends Well” and “Much Ado about Nothing”. There weren’t any novels in English in Shakespeare’s time, but there were continental picaresques and chivalrous romances, followed not long thereafter by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s astounding masterpiece, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha with its eponymous hero — perhaps the greatest novel ever written. For two hundred years afterward, novels were named after their protagonists, titles like Tom Jones and Clarissa. True, one of the most clever 18th century novels, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, did not have such a title, but it was a novel that pretended not to be a novel, since it represented itself as a first-hand account of actual events. 1 By and large, titles were not the strong suits of authors back then.

Things began to change in the early nineteenth century — the titles themselves began to show some signs of literary originality. Jane Austen was too clever to name her books Elizabeth Bennett or Elinor Dashwood when she could give us Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (although she also gave us Emma). But even so, title really took off with the advent of series. You couldn’t call every story about Sherlock Holmes “The Story of Sherlock Holmes”, after all, so suddenly we get “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League” and “A Scandal in Bohemia” (note that the scandal is averted, however).

John D. MacDonald’s series about boat bum Travis McGee were always instantly identifiable by the fact that they always had a color in the title, usually taken from a phrase in the book itself. A Purple Place for Dying. A Tan and Sandy Silence. The Empty Copper Sea. This title trick was how you could tell a Travis McGee story from a John D. stand-alone, of which there were plenty. I’m probably wrong, but as far as I know it was the first time that a unifying concept was used in series titles other than Holmes’ generic “The Adventure of [Fill in the Blank]”.

John M. Floyd, another Southern mystery writer with a middle initial, has given us some terrific categories of story titles. He shows us how they are actually constructed. To them I would add three more: the Noun & Noun Title (the aforementioned Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black), the Infinitive Title (To Kill a Mockingbird, To Live and Die in L.A., To Have and Have Not), and The Man Who/With/From Title (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Man From Laramie).

But to answer Paul’s questions:

Do you have specific rules for your titles, or do they come about through osmosis?

Yes. First, as I already indicated, the title must be a fair label for the story and give the reader some accurate expectation as to what he will find in the story. For that reason, most Treviscoe titles will have some classical reference: “The Dioscuri Deception”, “Black Spartacus”, “The Iphis Incident”, “Actæon in Albion”, since Treviscoe is classically educated and uses his knowledge to arrive at a solution. Notice also that I like a little alliteration or assonance in the titles to help make them easier to remember (“The Warcoombe Witch”). I also like unusual words that set a story apart: “An Ingraft of Evil” (what the hell is an “ingraft”, anyway?), “Miching Malicho” (all right, Steve, I admit that this one is from “Hamlet”). Since I mostly write historicals, when I do pen a contemporary story, it should have an unmistakably modern sound so that the reader won’t be expecting shoe buckles and lace cuffs: “Heat of the Moment”, “Cold Reason”, “Jungle Music”. I have only used quotes three times, once for “Miching Malicho”, then for the Treviscoe novel Whose Lust Is Murder (from Pope’s translation of The Iliad), and finally for “When the Wind Blows”. The last seemed the only possible title for a story about babies falling to their deaths during Santa Ana winds.

How much time do you spend on titles?

A lot. A whole lot.

Do you always have a title before you begin, or does it arrive during, or after?

Usually a story begins with a working title, usually a single word, a simple label. There will usually be two or three changes before I settle on a final title, although some are too good to abandon even if the work is nowhere near its completion. (How can I go wrong with Heaven’s Devils as a title for a story about a movie stunt pilot, especially since “Hell’s Angels” is a classic aviation film?)

By the way, the same thing applies to characters. When I start a story, my characters almost always have place-holder names that will change in the final version.

How often (if ever) does a title change once you’ve written or rewritten something?

Usually, when something is finished, it’s finished, and that includes the title. I will on rare occasions rethink the title of a finished or nearly finished work — the unpublished Treviscoe novel, Whose Lust Is Murder, was originally called Mount Misery, after a hill in Blackheath where I put a manor house. I changed it when I became aware of a hospital drama/satire by Samuel Shem with the same title.

I’ll sign off with a little Diction Cop discourse. Word mavens are split on whether the correct verb to use to describe assigning a name to story should be titled or entitled. Contemporary practice favors the former, leaving the latter to mean exclusively “having a right or privilege assigned”, as in “entitled to practice law,” but H. W. Fowler and Kingsley Amis regard using it to mean “assigned name of a story” as perfectly acceptable.

I’m going with Fowler on this one, folks, because it offered the opportunity to have a double meaning for the label to this very piece. And that’s another good rule for titles — go for as many meanings as you can, so long as they’re relevant. Hey, I write for a living. I’m entitled to a little artistic license.

And th-th-th-th-that’s all folks, for Title Week! I hope the Gentle Reader enjoyed it, so keep those cards and letters coming. Based on your feedback, we might do more round table discussions in the future.

1. In fact, Defoe was only six years old in 1665, the year the book records. [↩]