It’s All In The Title

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

I’m writing a new book at the moment, a chess-based one about disassociation in children. It’s all going well, except for the fact that all the different elements of my real, non-writing life, seem to conspire daily to prevent me from doing any work. That said, I should have this handwritten first draft finished in the next month or so. By which time I’ll have written around 900 A5 pages. When I eventually come round to editing it, I’ll have a nightmare job cutting it down in size - the original idea was to write a 250 page novel.

Where should I go next?

But there’s another problem approaching. The same one I had with The Tale of the Birds. The same one I’ve had with loads of my short stories. What am I going to call it? The main character is a girl, so I’m tempted to put “Queen” in the title, but that’s been done before, probably many times.

Titles are difficult, and they never seem to come easily. I have loads of works in progress, including this chess one, and precious few of them have even a working title. And titles are so important.

In the end, the reason I went with The Tale of the Birds was because it fitted in with the general saga feel I wanted to create, and also because the sequence in the novel that the title refers to is important, shining a spotlight on Rurik’s (the main character) soul as well as his deeds.  

So I’m wondering - does anyone have a formula for thinking of good, potentially successful titles for stories? Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: chess, novel, the Tale of the Birds, titles
Posted in Short Story | No Comments »

Massacres

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

The book I’m currently writing is going well. Real life keeps intruding, of course, in various ways, but all in all I’m fairly pleased with it. It’s still early days, of course, and I really wish I was better at thinking up titles, but it’s getting there. I’m pretty much entering the middle phase of the first draft now. 230 A5 pages written. I wish I had the maths skills to work out how many Microsoft Word pages that translates to.

My cousin commented on how violent The Tale of the Birds is. This one isn’t bloody like that, but lots of dark themes are cropping up…neglect, single parents, obsessive behaviour, drug abuse and the like. It’s certainly making it interesting to write, but it’s not exactly the light, frothy children’s book I was expecting it to be. Still, at least I’ve managed to resist the urge to include any massacres. So far, at least.

The other thing this book is doing is getting me back into writing after a fairly long break. I made a start oon the sequel to The Tale of the Birds a while back, but it came to nought. The other day, though, while writing a scene for the children’s (?) book, the entire prologue for The Tale of the Bird’s sequel flashed before my eyes. It’s perfect, because it explains just about everything that needs to be explained from The Tale of the Birds in an active, progressive manner. And you know what? There isn’t even a massacre in that scene, either. Yet.

Tags: author, book, children's novel, fantasy, first draft, the Tale of the Birds, themes, writing
Posted in Short Story | No Comments »