Titles

I thought I might explain how difficult it is to come up with a title for a book. I suppose I was really affected by Henry James look at book covers and the thought that he put into coming up with the right one. I look at the illustrations by Quentin Blake for Roald Dahl, and I recognise that there are a lot of things apart from the writing that are satisfying in a book.
I know that my husband held out with some stories that I thought should have been published sooner. He wanted a friend to produce images for his stories. When I read the stories in their joint book, I felt very satisfied. It was like being taken back to childhood and reading blocks of print but then poring over the images for a long time to decide if your imagination matched the imagination and the skill of the artist. Marco Luccio's images seemed to say something about John's stories but do a lot more. It was like being a child and an adult at the same time.
I suppose titles are another part of a book that can be satisfying. As a reader, I keep checking each event against the title as if it were a clue. I suppose I want my titles to be clues too. The first book I wrote was called Tangled up with Blues. I was satisfied with this title because it indicated the football club I was writing about and the Police. It is also almost the title of a Bob Dylan song which meant that I brought a richness and an added meaning and a musical undernote to my novel.
The second novel I wrote was titled Scar Tissue. At the time I thought this was a really good name because the series of events that occurred were triggered by a trauma that had happened in childhood. While the Bob Dylan song brought a good snowball effect, piling up the meanings and adding an extra dimension of its own, the title Scar Tissue, was a title that I see often today. It calls to mind a slick detective novel with a realistic image on the cover. It seems that all the meaning was drained from my novel by the other titles also being called that.
Another way authors come up with titles is to use part of a saying or a cliché. I am reading Lee Child’s thriller Gone Tomorrow at the moment. This is half of a saying ‘Here today and gone tomorrow.’ I suppose using this type of saying means that you have hundreds of years of meanings to be added to your title. This resonates with the reader and brings them some familiarity. It makes them feel they can measure the title against the meaning that they know. I used the title When Push Comes to Shove with my next detective novel. I wanted this sense of familiarity, and I wanted to point the way to the murder and who had done it as a sort of clue.
With my memoir I had a lot of trouble coming up with a title because it seemed so personal and I wanted the facts to speak for themselves. Then I realised that there were no facts. It was then that I came up with the title Storytelling because I thought about the way my life had been overlayed with anecdotes so that the anecdote seemed more real and certainly less complicated than the truth. I also used the title Storytelling as a tribute to my mother. I wanted to get the sense that no matter how painful an event, she would be able to take the edge off it by telling it as a story.
I also think that for my whole life I wanted to make sense of my past by writing stories about it. These events gave me my inspiration, but they weren’t the whole truth. I could only see it from my own perspective so that there are hundreds of stories that haven’t been told because the people have forgotten that event or they chose to keep it to themselves. Perhaps they were being kind by not mentioning the way they saw it to others.
I suppose the Indigenous people of this land use the term Storytelling to show how their history is passed from one generation to the next. Stories are more flexible than written information because a story can be told for the context that the audience are in. I wanted that aspect of stories being so flexible and told to comfort the audience as well as to pass on information. Anyway, that’s my title and I will grow to love it or hate it over time, but it is true for now.

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