Memorable Titles

Writers are bedeviled by different aspects of the writing biz. For some, it's developing a gripping plot; for others it's creating sympathetic characters. And for still others, it's the title. Most of us have working titles on our computers, but the day always comes when we have to come up with something memorable, catchy and relevant. Hemingway, no slouch in this department, thought Fitzgerald the best at creating these short verbal tags.

When I began writing the Anita Ray series, I decided to use a consistent format for the title. I would use the name of a deity that reflected some of the issues in the story, and in a prepositional phrase if possible. Coming up with a tag for the first book, Under the Eye of Kali, gave me the idea, and I've enjoyed playing around with deities and phrases since then.

The idea for this post came from a series of messages on DorothyL. A number of posters mentioned titles that led them to purchase the book. That got me thinking about memorable titles--the ones I actually remember as humorous, intriguing, or well crafted. This is a sample of those as well as the ones mentioned on DorothyL. I don't dissect them here because that seems too much like analyzing a joke. Instead I offer a little humor on what has turned into a delightful and warm and sunny Thursday.

If you have a favorite title, I hope you'll add it in the comments.

Below are some fun titles, and below that is a link for more on titles.

The Case of the Blood-stained Egg Cosy, by James Anderson

Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson

Let the Dog Drive, by David Bowman

Cast, in Order of Disappearance, by Simon Brett

Killer Hair, by Ellen Byerrum

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain.

The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesteron

The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin

Skeleton in Search of a Cupboard, by E.X. Ferrars

Smallbone Deceased, by Michael Gilbert

The Man with a Load of Mischief, by Martha Grimes

Death and the Pregnant Virgin, by S.T. Haymon

Carrying Albert Home: The Story of a Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator, by Homer Hickam.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carre

If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him, by Sharyn McCrumb

Bimbos of the Death Sun, by Sharyn McCrumb

A Morbid Taste for Bones, by Ellis Peters

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks

I Still Miss My Man (But My Aim Is Getting Better), by Sarah Shankman  

http://bristol-library-bookblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/judging-book-by-its-title.html

Leave a comment with a memorable title. And my thanks to DorothyL.

A Writer's Repertory

I recently came across a quote by Gore Vidal that caught my attention and sparked my thinking about major and minor characters. Anyone who writes a mystery series will develop a number of minor characters in order to tell a fully fleshed-out story. I have several in the Anita Ray series, not all of them recurring, but Vidal's comment made me take a second look at them.

The quote is taken from an interview with Vidal in Conversations with American Writers edited by Charles Ruas.

"I heard somewhere the idea that every writer has a given theatre in his head, a repertory company. Shakespeare has fifty characters, I have ten, Tennessee [Williams] has five, [Ernest] Hemingway has one, [Samuel] Beckett is busy trying to have none. You are stuck with your repertory company and you can only put on plays with its characters." (quoted in Authors Guild Bulletin, Summer 2014, p. 34)

Normally I would keep reading after Vidal self-servingly claims to have ten characters while other writers, Williams and Hemingway, have far fewer. But his comment on Beckett, which made me laugh, was smarter than I gave him credit for being, and his final comment was worth thinking about.

I don't know how many characters the average writer has. But I do think all writers are in danger of repeating ourselves. If we have one successful book, we are tempted to look for the magic in it, and try to capture and repeat it, for future success. If we don't do that overtly, we may still begin a second story and soon find ourselves repeating scenes that reveal patterns. This is the territory of academics, who look for themes and underlying issues in a writer's body of work.

Anyone who writes a series in any genre faces the problem of avoiding repetition, and we work hard to make our characters and stories original in each installment. It goes without saying that we develop a main character that can carry a number of stories. We then surround our series character with a family, of sorts, of supporting characters who have the potential to grow and surprise us. We give each character a past or history, clear physical description, and specific attitudes and quirks. We strive to know them deeply, their emotional content, as well as their ordinary behavior.

In the Anita Ray series, Anita lives with her Auntie Meena at Hotel Delite. The cast of characters includes Moonu, the main waiter, Ravi, the desk clerk, and various other staff. Anita encounters murder among hotel guests and at her relatives' homes. If Anita travels, she usually does so with her Auntie Meena and Joseph, the hotel driver. This core cast was introduced in the first Anita Ray mystery, Under the Eye of Kali.

After characters, we turn our focus to creating unusual situations to test the sleuth and explore other types of character. In the second Anita Ray mystery, The Wrath of Shiva, Anita discovers the theft of ancient images from her extended family's estate. Smuggling of holy images in India is a special problem because of the sacredness and unique standing of these icons. We learn more about Anita's physical courage in this story.

We may change setting, introduce problems among the "family" members, or put the sleuth in danger. But the goal has to continue to be to make the characters seem as real as possible. Whether we like them or not, the individual who crosses the stage must feel real to engage the reader.

I don't know how many characters I have in my repertory, but I work hard to develop minor characters so that they carry much of the story and are themselves worth reading about. I want what happens to them to be interesting and their circumstances compelling. In the third Anita Ray mystery, For the Love of Parvati, Anita shares part of center stage with Parvati, a maidservant with a secret and a fear. As an undocumented worker from Sri Lanka, she has fled the now-ended civil war but fears that others hold her to an old code of honor.

Anita travels easily through the layers of society that is modern India, from life with foreigners at her hotel to traditional homes and ways of life. In a short story, "The Secret of the Pulluvan Drum," Anita meets another young woman trying to

traverse the same boundary, between the traditional and the modern.

I don't think I could write a story without a character, in imitation of Samuel Beckett, but if you're wondering how he does it, look at a few of his shorter works. For a play without a character, I nominate Quad, one of my favorite Beckett "performances,"available on youtube.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPJBIvv13Bc

Enduring the Life of the Writer

I recently came across a quote by Kurt Vonnegut that had me nodding my head in agreement. But as I did so, I wondered how many people really understood what Vonnegut was getting at. The quote is this.

 “Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”

Plenty of people say they want to write, but what they really want is the prestige of having written. They want to stand around at a potluck dinner and casually mention they've just finished their novel, or they want to sit on a panel at a conference and talk about how hard it is to understand this character and his motivation. They want, in essence, to be seen as a writer. Few really want to live the life of a writer. And that is probably because few understand what that life is like, and when they do get an inkling of it, they find something else to do.

Writing is a desk job and, even worse, a seven-day-a-week desk job. Writing requires the discipline to

claim a seat every day at the same time for hours at a time, to work on projects that may become tedious, disappointing, frustrating, confusing, threatening or worse, and keep at it until you either finish it or abandon it, wasting valuable time and inner resources. And you do it alone.

For many years I was a free-lance editor and ghost writer. I reached my desk every morning, five days a week, at nine o'clock. I took a break for lunch and worked till at least five o'clock. I tracked all my time, for billing reasons, even stopping the clock to take a phone call. I kept a careful record of hours for my final invoice, in case anyone cared to challenge it. If you are a ghost writer, you may negotiate lots of specific terms but you can never know until you begin how you're going to feel writing this particular project. You may find that you despise this book after the third chapter, but you also may be very reluctant to quit the job at hand because that's your paycheck. If you've taken an advance on the job, you're going to have to give money back.

If you are going to write for a living, you are going to be tied to deadlines. Once you agree to a project, for example, editing a six-hundred-page book on labor relations in Egypt, you're accepting the publisher's schedule, and the vicissitudes of your life matter little or not at all. If the author is late responding to your queries, you may still not be able to renegotiate your deadlines.

And you have no one to complain to about the injustice of it all except your partner. Spouses of writers are known to be extremely generous and tolerant, if they last, out of necessity.

Once I started focusing on writing fiction during the day, instead of late at night or on weekends, life did not change. I still had deadlines for book reviews, articles and essays, and manuscript evaluations.

And whenever I went to a potluck dinner, the last thing I wanted to talk about was my "work." I can't talk about a story I'm working on, and god knows I don't want to talk about the writing life. It's a job. Do you expect a plumber to talk about the sink he put in earlier that afternoon?

Some years ago I dropped into the Boston office for a nonprofit that provided pro-bono legal referrals for artists. The room was small, with a window looking out over a busy downtown street. The walls were covered with bookshelves packed with legal tomes. The desk was a chaotic mess. The young woman who worked there was the sole employee. She had no other co-workers in that old office building, and saw no one during the day unless she went out for coffee or lunch. Depending on your attitude, she had the best or the worst job in the city.

The life of the writer means that you spend most of every day alone. You have no one to bounce ideas off of, except for the weekly or monthly writers' group.  The rise of social media has changed things a bit for writers. Now we can check in online with a host of strangers doing just what we're doing--trying to stay focused on a story that refuses to cooperate. But we're still alone with our problems.

If you're a writer, no one cares if you're tired or depressed or have allergies. Your editor only cares if you turn in your work on time and in publishable condition. You can send your mss out to beta readers, but in the end you're the only one who can fix things in the story. And when your story does get published, you may have to tolerate interpretations that make you think your story was published in a foreign language on another planet. And then there are the well-meaning friends and relatives who think you should talk to their Auntie Gertrude who once wrote a really good poem and met an editor, though, of course he'd be 120 by now if still alive, but he did have a son in the business too.

Vonnegut was certainly right about the rigors of the life of the writer. But those of us who do endure it know that it's the only way to live. It's merely a bonus that it's also the best way to escape the inanities of this world, and perhaps save some of our own sanity in the process. If you don't love to write, to choose automatically to spend most of every day with yourself alone and naturally lean toward facing frustrations and problems alone with no help from anyone else, then writing is probably not for you.

I found Vonnegut's quote at a site that offered 20 quotes on writing by any number of writers--Vonnegut, Rowling, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and many more.

http://www.azevedosreviews.com/2013/06/03/kurt-vonneguts-20-quotes-on-writing/

What does it mean to write what you know?

Several years ago I attended a Memorial Day neighborhood picnic, and met several newcomers to the area. One woman scowled at me when she heard I was a writer. She said, "I suppose you look around at us for characters and use what we say in your books." I've remembered her comment for its naked suspicion and hostility, as though every writer were out to exploit the people we meet. Perhaps some writers do, but for the most part writers don't misuse real people. So, what does it mean when we tell beginning writers to write what you know?

During a recent talk I tried to explain how writers use their own lives to give depth and authenticity to a

story. In the Mellingham series, Chief of Police Joe Silva is the middle of seven children. I'm only the third of four, so I don't know what such a large family feels like. But my father was the middle of nine children, and he often told stories about growing up in a large family living in a small house. He lived in a household with his parents and six sisters, two brothers, and one bathroom. The dining table couldn't seat everyone, and his father was a great reader, with a special chair in the living room by the front window. This is all I needed to imagine Joe's birth family.

Anita Ray lives in Hotel Delite, a tourist hotel in a resort in South India. I once stayed at a hotel on the beach that had been a private home. The layout ensured that all rooms viewed the sea, and when it was converted to a hotel the small size made it easy to manage. In other parts of India I encountered hotels named Delite, which I found charming, so I borrowed the name. The original home/hotel has since been greatly enlarged, the restaurant enlarged, the kitchen moved, and the dining room moved. The hotel I write about is long gone, but the atmosphere lives on.

As a photographer, I enjoy working ideas about this art, or craft, into the story, as well as pointing out how it affects the way Anita looks at things. But I have to work to learn more about photography, to keep up with Anita, who is far more expert than I am. I learn from other photographers, and include some of their insights and discoveries and practices.

Every writer overhears a conversation that is tantalizing, but as Henry James warned, we don't want to hear too much. We want just enough to spark the imaginative journey; otherwise it's just unpleasant gossip. In any city or town, we see people pass by and barely notice them. But if we did, we'd find our visual vocabulary strikingly enriched. A father and his son, the boy a perfect miniature of the man with red curly hair, slight body, pigeon-toed walk, and tipping shoulders, stroll a beach. A teenage girl wearing a black slip as a dress under a red denim jacket, purple hair and dangly earrings recites what she told her boyfriend the night before, insisting that he should behave better and act like an adult, an admonition that might have come out of her grandmother's mouth. There are no secrets here, no confidences violated and no intent to mock or demean.

Neighbors and others have every reason to feel vulnerable around their writer friends, because writers have an outlet and an audience denied to most. But responsible writers, and most are, don't use that their position to balance a perceived injustice, or exploit someone's powerlessness. The small details we pull out of real life are shimmering proof of authenticity of feeling and experience, not of one particular person's life.

Writers can protect against using anything real that might injure another. I take great care in inventing names that cannot be traced to any real person in my area. I ask friends if I can use the layout of their house or apartment for a character. I sometimes even ask if I can use a special phrase a friend uses because I suspect she'll recognize it if she reads the final book. I invent towns, street names, shops, and businesses because the point is to tell a good story, not delve into someone else's private life.

The advice to write what you know might be emended, following Hemingway, to "write what you know is true," true to life, true to your own experience, true to your perceptions of the world and its people. Anything else is false to your calling as a writer.