Why Titles Matter

Last night we had the final session of the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class, which is the session where we talk about everything except writing: stuff like going to conventions, and how to submit stories, and how to treat editors and what about audio markets and all that sort of thing. And I’d meant to include a section about plotting stories, because I’d taught a new class the day before, the Moving Your Story From Idea to Finished Draft class, and as often happens had come up with some new things to say about stories from thinking about one specific aspect, but there just wasn’t enough time. So I want to talk a little bit about it in a blog post.

As always, everyone’s writing process is different and the only one I can speak with authority about is my own. So perhaps this will click for you and perhaps it won’t. I hope it does.

Certainly, there are stories that arrive complete. They appear in my head and all I have to do is write them down. This is most likely to occur during the night, meaning I can rise, go to the keyboard, and bang it all out quickly. For example, “Pippa’s Smiles” arrived complete and ready to go, though it had its roots in some thoughts I had been mulling over about gendered narratives. Unfortunately, though, that’s not usually how it works.

For me, stories can start in a number of ways.

• They can start as a concept or idea: What if ghosts could fly into your mouth when you yawn? What if people could go back and live their lives over and over? What if some people could acquire psychic powers?
• A story can start with a particular character. That may be someone glimpsed on the street, or a historical figure that I find interesting and want to write about. Victoria Woodhull is a American from the 19th century who I have used more than once as a character.
• It can start with a particular scene that emerges vividly in my head. I may not know who the characters are, or why they’re there, but I know what it looks like.
• It may start with a particular theme. A recent story, “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen,”started with me thinking about how people accumulate layers of grudges. I decided that I wanted to literalize that metaphor and the story came quickly when I began exploring that idea.
• I have on occasion decided that I want to work in a genre that I have not tried before. That’s as valid a place to start a story as any. If I’m doing that, I often try to figure out the genre conventions and decide which I want to violate. A recent piece I finished, for example, is one where I decided I wanted to try writing a piece of horror fiction that drew heavily on very visceral, physical details.
• Often my starting point is another story by someone else. Many of my stories are replies to other pieces that have influenced me: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Robert Heinlein’s “The Menace From Earth”; O. Henry’s “The Pimaloosa Pancakes”; and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, among others.
• A story can also start with a piece of research. I used to write encyclopedia articles and when I ran across the story of Jumbo the elephant being purchased by PT Barnum, I knew I had to write something about it, because the details were just so fabulous and Jumbo’s eventual fate so moving. That ended up becoming “The Towering Monarch of His Race.”
• A story may begin as a deliberate attempt to break a rule or guideline. I wrote “Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know” as a reaction to one of my Clarion West classmates saying how much he hated stories where the author has a character look in a mirror in order to describe what the character looks like. I started thinking about a story in which the main character had to keep checking their appearance, because it was constantly changing.
• A story may even start with a particular title. That’s how “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” came about. All I knew about it was that there was a manticore somewhere in the story.

Those are all perfectly valid ways to start stories, at least for me, and I’ve used all of them at least once. The question that we explored in the class is what to do with each of those in order to start figuring out the story. One way is always to just sit down and start writing, doing what Samuel R. Delany calls “writing to discover.” Sometimes that works well. Other times it may not. My trick is to usually try to figure out the characters, if I don’t have them, and particularly the main character. The most important thing to discover about that main character is what they want, because that drives their actions and helps you figure out how the story will move along.

Knowing the character and what they want helps you discover how they are being prevented from getting what they want. Once you’ve got that, you’ve got some conflict that will help drive things along.

Part of what to do next depends on your own individual process. If you are someone who cannot write the story until they know everything that will happen, then you need to figure that out, while another person may just need a initial few facts in order to sit down and start writing in order to figure out what’s going on. Personally, I would begin thinking in terms of scenes. Get a list of those together and don’t worry about the order for now. You can always rearrange them once they’re written. This is one reason why increasingly I have been drafting stories in Scrivener; that software makes it very easy to move scenes around.

How does your process differ? Have I overlooked any possible ways stories can start?

In an earlier post I mentioned establishing the story’s conflict as something that is often best done in the story’s first three paragraphs. In order to expand on that, I’ve drawn examples from one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, all of which are available in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.

I see her first while the Mexicana 747 is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

The title plays off nearly every line: “I see her first,” (who? is it one of the women from the title?) “a double female blur,” “the near blur,” “the younger blur, “registering nothing,” finishing up with “I never would have looked at them or thought of them again,” at which point the reader is screaming why? why don’t you see them? The answer to that question is crucial to the story.

Here’s another Tiptree beginning, this time of “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” which uses the strategy of referring to a memory to reveal the conflict. The memory is connected to gender and embarrassment, which will also turn out to be crucial to the story.

Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long-ago moment. Himself running blindly — or was he pushed? –into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. The hush. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. The first blaring giggle. Girls. He was in the girls’ can.

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” is Tiptree at her best, examining gender norms and conventions with a ruthless, scathingly honest eye. Somehow that first moment of embarrassment, that moment of being in “the strange toilet” encapsulates so much of what that story is about and how alien the sexes can be to each other as well as how strange their container, the norms that make them up, which constitute the walls of “the can” itself, are. Look at how the center of his masculinity is framed visually: the gray zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. There is so much going on in that first paragraph, including sensory details like the twitch of his insides, the blare of a giggle, the pattern and threat of a zipper, that it’s worth copying out, pulling apart sentence by sentence to figure out how it’s working.

Let’s finish up with Tiptree in a moment that puts everything up front, in the short story “We Who Stole the Dream”:

The children could survive only twelve minims in the sealed containers.

Woah. We don’t know what’s going on precisely, but we know crucial details. We have a deadline and it is only twelve minims. While we don’t know how long a minim is, we know it’s not much time because of that “only”. Plus, there’s an auditory echo of “minute” that makes us think they’re of similar length.

What’s at stake? This lives of children, for pete’s sake. Not just child, but children, multiple. And we know how they’ll die: suffocation. It would be hard to write a tauter, more dire beginning.

Writing exercise: write three first lines. They can state the stakes, as in the third example, or refer to some memory or object that encapsulates the conflict, as with the example from “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Include two titles for each, one that plays off the beginning and one that does not.

For bonus points, read “The Women Men Don’t See” and use that as your inspiration.

Feel free to post some of your best first lines on here, I’d love to see some!