Grimly and copper and titles and Bert

[mrissa]

I am coming to the part of this book where "said Soldrun grimly" is going to have to be expunged a million times in the next draft. She says a lot of stuff grimly. That's kind of how it goes. I could fuss about it now, or I could just write it down and move on to the next bit and handle it in revisions. It's one of those things that goes remarkably easily in revisions, not like getting the timing of character deaths wrong by a decade or more, or neglecting to write major plot points. (She said, carefully not looking at the manuscript of Sampo.)

Speaking of which, I was thinking about alternate titles for Sampo again. I was hoping to find something that went with Thermionic Night and Midnight Sun Rising a bit more, but so far Copper Mountain is all I've got. I like it because it's not only the traditional/mythical name of the place where most of the book takes place, but also refers to all the copper wire being strung about it over the course of the book currently known as Sampo. I'm not sure, though.

All the other ideas I've come up with have sounded like short story titles to me. Do you draw distinctions? Are there things you think make fine short story titles and terrible novel titles? Can you articulate why, or at least give examples?

My allergies are still rather miserable, but seem to be tapering off a bit with the rain. My aunt and uncle are down at my folks' house already. markgritter's folks are coming to town tomorrow, and my grands will make it up from New Ulm sometime Sunday. (They're going to a wedding there this weekend.) And markgritter's post of the best Ernie and Bert bit ever made me laugh so hard I fell over. (But has Bert always been from the East Coast? Did no one warn me? I just thought he talked funny when I was little, like any other Muppet talked funny, not like, you know, a specific talking funny.)

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

For whatever reason, long or cryptic titles mostly make me think of short stories, or short story collections. Or nouns, preceded by "the."

Such as:
"Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tic-Toc Man"
"The Goldbug"

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was going to say, the longer the title, the shorter the work can be. It's like the library truism: The longer the call number, the thinner the spine.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is why I think Nightfall Under the Copper Mountain is probably not a good book title, yes: too long.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

And Copper Mountain Evening sounds like a John Denver album.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am trying so hard not to let my brain write John Denver pastiches about my books. So hard. And I haven't sung fake John Denver at you since the very first moment I read this comment, and I think I deserve credit for that.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

And "Copper Mountain Dusk" sounds like a celebrity perfume brand.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The latter may well be Ray Bradbury's fault. During Zen in the Art of Writing, he talks about coming up with stories by generating a list of nouns and writing stories from "The [noun]." "The Veldt," etc.

Not that he's the only one who does it. Still and all.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

:) It's possible, but I was thinking of high school English class more than any particular writer.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Short story titles do not have colons in them. (By my reckoning.)

Length of title is not necessarily an indicator of story shortness. To Kill A Mockingbird vs. Nightfall.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, obviously it's not a mathematical law. But still, To Kill a Mockingbird is a lot fewer syllables than "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktock Man" or "Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the Drum." I'm having a hard time thinking that very many people are going to get away with titles that long for a novel, even though a short-short could easily be called "I."

(Now squashing the urge to write short shorts with letter-of-the-alphabet titles.)

[barondave.livejournal.com]

As an exercise in memory, I didn't want to look anything up. I resisted citing the huge titles of Dickens et al. How about One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, clocking in at a merely two syllables fewer than Repent Harlequin, said the Ticktockman? Or Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me? Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter? I'm having trouble thinking of one-syllable short story titles, but I'm sure there are some.

In any event, I think you should title a work appropriately. Whatever feels good, name it. Marketing plays a key, as noted below, as does the length of your own name and the cover art. But you shouldn't worry about that.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I think I have expectations, based on conventions, but I don't think I'd be upset if someone had the nerve to violate my expectations. In fact, I could see one or two writers starting an avalanche of 'short story titles' on their novels, and that could be a good thing.

Generally, I do identify longer, more complex, or wittier titles as being short story titles. Short, simple titles can work for both, but a short story with a really simple short title that doesn't provide double-readings or reflect on the narrative always seems like sort of a wasted opportunity to me, unless the simplicity strongly reinforces some quality of the story.

I do think there's a trend toward keeping novel titles shorter, but I don't know if I think it's a good, necessary, or long-lasting trend. If you look back even fifty years, you can find much...lusher...titles on novels than would meet current expectations - and even those are looser than it might seem (viz, To Say Nothing Of The Dog, which is a short story title if ever there was one by my usual expectations). On the other hand, for one's /first/ novel, it might be better to stay within the current norms, which I think are one or two important words, and very few little words. BLAH of the BLAH is about as long as I see being common.

Novel titles also currently tend, I think, to be nouns or gerunds. If the title is one noun, it can have an adjective. If there's two nouns, they both have to be unmodified. (This is just what I'm deducing from looking at my shelves, mind you.) You can have "Year of the Griffin" or "Freedom and Necessity," or you can have "The Pandora Principle" or "The Bird's Nest," (or, with the gerund option, "Buying Time") but it would be less usual to have "The Year of Frequent Griffins" or "My Freedom and Your Necessity" as novel titles. ("The Blah of Blahish Blah" seems more like a YA kind of title to me, actually. Not sure if that one really generalizes, though.)

Short story titles can be much more daring and have much more content. I think it's partly that they get used less, so they can be less efficient to repeat ("Time Considered As a Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones" could be an annoying novel title to throw around), and more that the story is, by necessity, less complex than the novel, so the title has a chance at actually contributing to or reflecting the content of the story, while in a novel there's no hope.

Short story titles can also be direct quotations or references, which is much less common with novels.

I admire really good short story titles. They're like good poetry, layers of meaning folded in on themselves into a compact bundle. I think it would be fun to see a move toward similar titles for novels, but I don't think that's where we are right now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the factors I think we cannot neglect here is that people buy novels based on the title and almost never buy short stories based on the title. (Worse -- at least for short story writers -- people buy novels and almost never buy short stories.) So I think it's much easier to set a new fashion or break boundaries in short story titles, because you only have to convince one person or at most a handful of people that you have a good title for a short story, and then it's tucked into a magazine or anthology where many people will have bought it already before they really get into lookin gat the title. It's not so much part of the marketing, is what I'm saying.

On the other hand, as minnehaha B. pointed out to me last time I was talking about novel titles, publishing houses do employ staff members who consider changing a title from something they think won't sell to something that will part of their job descriptions. So.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

That is also a good point. It's why I think you see longer, more complex titles mostly on the works of well-established writers. Because there, the author's name is selling the book at least as much as the title, and besides, the author has more clout to do something unconventional.

And, yeah, the publishing house probably will cheerfully say, "Great book, lousy title, we'll print it as X." But there's no point in setting yourself up for yet another arena of "I want Y but the publisher insists on X" frustrations - as I understand it, there will be plenty of those even without.

I happen to really like "Nightfall Under the Copper Mountain," but I bet you it would sell better as a young adult novel than otherwise. Still, at least it's essentially a noun. (There has to be a term for a phrase which translates to an object, as an expansion of the noun category, but I'm blanking on what that would be.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this is very much not a YA. I have a YA in mind set under the Copper Mountain, but it's at dusk at the very latest, and so far its title is Winter Wars.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Per the above rules, it seems like the title ought to be Copper of the Mountain.

Which, not knowing a thing about the book, seems perfectly reasonable!

[writerjob.livejournal.com]

FWIW, 'Nightfall Under the Copper Mountain' sounds fine to me.

Book titles -- I'm trying to think about this and decide why book titles are shorter -- have to be appropriate to 387 pages. Short story titles need only apply to 10 or 15.

I guess that's not very clear.

Anyhow ... have you been to?

http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/index.php



JoB

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. It thinks that Nightfall Under the Copper Mountain scores in the 20s, Copper Mountain in the 40s, unless it's figurative instead of literal (it's both -- there was no button for both), in which case 69% chance of becoming a bestseller.

0% chance of becoming a bestseller, I suspect, as it is written for a genre audience, not for a general one.

Speaking of names of things, it did not occur to me that you are WriterJoB. I thought of WriterOccupation and of WriterBiblicalCharacter, See Sufferings Of. But there was another possibility, which I had not considered, and it seems likely now that you've signed your post with it.

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

The title Munchkin Death Certificate has a 63.7% chance of being a bestselling title!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But it's not a title, it's a band name!

Well. I suppose we could do a self-titled album.

[writerjob.livejournal.com]

Yep. It's Jo B.

... rather than working as a writer (though I have done) or afflicted by boils (which fortunately I haven't.)

JoB

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Either way, Copper Mountain scores better than either Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone or Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, either one of which only had a 14.3% chance of becoming a bestseller.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Funny, Bert doesn't sound at all East Coast to me. Example: his flat 'a' in "pajamas" sounds extremely MidWest to me - Ernie's pronunciation is far closer to what I think of as The Right Way to Say It, which, me being from the East Coast myself, generally translates into standard mid-Atlantic states pronunciation.

Actually, Bert sounded almost North-Dakotan to me - I kept expecting him to say, "Don't eat cookies in bed, you hoser!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You have not been exposed to enough North Dakotans.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I used to work with a classic example of the breed. No, you're right, he's not really all that North Dakotan - it was just something about the intonations that reminded me of them. The flat 'a' I mentioned actually sound more Ohioan to me.

But definitely not East Coast!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ohio is the East.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sort of. But not East Coast. Maybe it's a difference that matters more if you're from there, like Minneapolis and St. Paul?

Anyway, the accent is definitely different in Ohio from places further East. I guess since when I grew up it was west of where I lived and I always heard it lumped in with the midwest, I have a skewed viewpoint.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

American accents: I suspect North American dialects of English could be divided into "Newfoundland" and "everywhere else."

That aside: If I recall correctly, Ohio has more than one dialect. I believe most states east of the Mississippi do, and a fair number west of there. Dialects do not follow state boundaries. For example, New York State has three dialect areas: New York Metropolitan, which extends into New Jersey and Connecticut; Hudson Valley -- Rod Serling's dialect and mine -- which extends into Pennsylvania -- and Upstate, which extends into Vermont. (The parts of Long Island which have not yet been completely suburbanized are also considered to be in the Upstate dialect area. I have my doubts about this.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Philadelphia has more than one in itself. I know Boston and New Orleans both do, as well.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

That's like saying Maryland is the South.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I disagree--to me he sounds very Northeastern. The flat A veers toward Boston, but his accent has a definite tinge of Noo Yawk (not the stereotypical New York accent, but it's in there). Which makes sense, considering that Sesame Street was developed in New York.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Short story titles are part of the story. Good titles, defined as titles that appeal to me, are part of the story. Novel titles... I have working titles and "Twilight's Children". Which is actually the best I can come up with with that novel-length thing.

I like the way your mind works, though. So chances are I'd read things with any titles.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much! But I'm afraid that titles are supposed to (in part, at least, and ideally) signal how the authorial mind works to people who don't already read the author's lj. Or at least indicate what kind of authorial mind people are dealing with. So I will keep plugging away at it.

Copper Mountain

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

is a ski resort in Colorado if that changes anything for you. (it's one of the best, too.)

Re: Copper Mountain

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It can't change Finnish mythology, so the place name has to remain the same anyway. Thanks, though.