My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #36, March 9, 1998

WINNING THE TITLE

For me, half the fun of writing columns is figuring out what I'm thinking--I'm often at least as surprised as you are. And half the fun is hearing from people who read what I have to say. But the other half the fun is coming up with good titles. (Yes, I know that adds up to three halves. It is my concession to a nation that seems to believe that people who only give a 100% effort are slackers.)

A really good title is a work of art. It has to suggest something about the content of the piece. But unless you're writing for a scholarly academic journal, where inducing slumber is a virtue, it also has to intrigue readers, suck them in, make them say, "Tell me more." I have bought a fair amount of books just because they were called things like I Worship the Very Dirt She Treats Me Like, or Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Home Skills. The title of my column on rock group names, Sensible Lizards, made perfect sense in context--it was drawn from two of the groups, Captain Sensible and The Brotherhood of Lizards. But it was also intended to make my audience say, "Er, would you care to explain that?" and stick around to find out what the column had to say.

What are some of the ways good titles work? Often with puns, for which I have a regrettable fondness. So it should not surprise you that one of my cherished books, about the oddities of expression in various languages, is called Idiom's Delight. It always pleases me when a pun comes into my head that describes what I've just written: White Whine, was both a lovely little pun and a capsule description of the aggrieved attitude of the bright young white high school guys I was telling you about, who sincerely believed affirmative action robbed them of what was theirs by right; Light Out referred to Huck Finn lighting out for the territory, but more importantly to the loss of our sense of community--the turning off of a light in our culture.

Allusion is one of the nifty tricks writers use, because it allows us to borrow good lines from great writers and attach to our own work the weight and resonance of theirs. A title, like any act of writing, is a joint venture between the writer and the reader, in which the writer relies on readers' knowledge and understanding. Readers, on the other hand, give themselves mental points for recognizing the lines we're borrowing, so using allusions is also a subtle way of flattering our audience. When I wrote about Stephen King confronting the problem of evil, I called it Something Wicked This Way Comes--knowing you all are readers, I knew you would recognize not only the line from MacBeth, but also, in all likelihood, the Ray Bradbury book by that title.

Another good trick is to take a common phrase and twist it just a bit, like the collection of cartoons about Ronald Reagan called The Clothes Have No Emperor, or the rock group my son just told me about called Son of Sam I Am. Bea Lillie used that trick in the title of her autobiography, Every Other Inch a Lady, a title I borrowed for the piece on my mother. When I wrote a column back in 1995 about Newt Gingrich and his merry men passing laws rather faster than they could think about them and their possible consequences, I called it Just Stand There.

A good title can also convey attitude. Barbara Ehrenreich's book about the politics of the early 1990s, The Snarling Citizen, beautifully catches not only the tone of our political dialogue but her viewpoint on it. I tried to convey the utter mixedness of my feelings about the effects the internet will have with the title Mostly Progress, Maybe, Sort of....

And titles can convey the personality of the writer. You get such a sense of the person writing from a title like Judith Viorst's Love and Guilt and the Meaning of Life, etc., or from one of my all-time favorite books, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (Of course she can. Nobody stops Molly from telling you when our lawmakers are committing acts of public idiocy.) I don't know if any of my titles give as complete a sense of who I am and how I view the world. Maybe We Hold These (Small) Truths To Be Self-Evident (To Us). But perhaps the sum of all my titles does add up to a portrait of the artist as a, er, mature woman.