So a title should titillate, inveigle you, tease and bemuse you . . . but not confuse you or spill the beans. Titles in the vein of “The Journey” neither excite nor inform. “Hear the Whisper of the World”, I hope and pray (otherwise it’s a dumb example), fulfills the criteria.
The Blank of Blank titles are the kinds of titles away from which to stay, as Churchill might have syntactically put it. You know the kind I mean, The Doomfarers of Coramonde, The Dancers of Noyo, The Hero of Downways, The Ships of Durostorum, The Clocks of Iraz. That kind of baroque thing.
Naturally I’ve picked examples of such titles that include another sophomoric titling flaw. The use of alien-sounding words that cannot be readily pronounced or—more important—when the reader is asking to purchase the book or recommending it to someone else, words that cannot be remembered. “Hey, I read a great book yesterday. The Reelers of Skooth or The Ravers of Seeth or . . . I dunno, you look for it; it has a green cover . . .”
Asimov believed in short titles, because they’re easy to remember by sales clerks, book buyers for the chain stories, and readers who not only don’t recall the titles of what they’ve read, but seldom know the name of the author. On the other hand, both Chip Delany and I think that a cleverly constructed long title plants sufficient key words in a reader’s mind that, even if it’s delivered incorrectly, enough remains to make the point. Witness examples, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” or “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”. There is a strong argument both ways. “Nightfall”, Slan, Dune and “Killdozer” simply cannot be ignored. But then, neither can Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The rule of thumb, of course, is simple: if it’s clever and catchy enough, short or long doesn’t make a bit of difference.
But try to avoid being too clever. You can bad-pun and out-clever yourself into annoying a reader before the story is ever considered. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden makes it, but Your Erroneous Zones simply sucks. The original title for Roger Zelazny’s “He Who Shapes”, published in book form as The Dream Master, was “The Ides of Octember” which seems to me too precious by half, while the title Joe Haldeman originally wanted to put on his Star Trek novelization—“Spock, Meshuginah!”—caroms off into ludicrousness. But funny. I know from funny, and that is funny. Thomas Disch is a master at walking that line. Getting into Death is masterful, as is Fun with Your New Head. But the classic example of tightrope-walking by Disch was the original title of his novel Mankind under the Leash (the Ace Paperback title, and a dumb thing it is), which was originally called The Puppies of Terra. (That’s its title in England.)
Arthur Byron Cover has a flair for the utterly ridiculous that is so loony you have to buy the book to see if he can pull it off. Witness: The Platypus of Doom.
Until the very last tick before production, the title of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was “Mules in Horses’ Harness”; and though I truly love the hell out of it, sufficiently to have appropriated it half a century later for an essay I wrote, I think F. Scott Fitzgerald was well-pressured when his publisher badgered him into retitling Trimalchio in West Egg as The Great Gatsby.
The name of a character, if interesting, can be a way out when you’re stuck for a title. It’s surprising how few science fiction novels have done this, indicating the low esteem most traditional sf writers have placed on characterization, preferring to deal with Analog-style technician terms such as “Test Stand”, “Flashpoint”, “Test to Destruction”, or “No Connections”. We have so few novels with titles like The Great Gatsby, Babbitt, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or Lord Jim. Delany scored with Dhalgren, I’ve had some success with “Knox”, and Gordon Dickson’s best-loved story is “Black Charlie”.
Ideally, a title should add an extra fillip when you’ve finished reading a story. It should capsulize it, state the theme, and make a point after touchdown. It should, one hopes, explain more than you cared to baldly state in the text. Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” is a perfect example, as is the double-entendre of her “Dead Center”. It is an extra gift to an alert reader, and makes the reader feel close to you.
By the same token, you dare not cheat a reader with a clever title that doesn’t pay off. The one that pops to mind first is “The Gun Without a Bang”, one of the best titles from the usually satisfying Robert Sheckley. Great title. The only thorn on that rose was that it was a dumb story about some people who find a gun that didn’t make any noise, which says a whole lot less than the symbolic, metaphysical, textual, or tonal implications passim the title’s promise.
One of the most brilliant title-creators sf has ever known is Jack Chalker. I’m not talking about the actual stories, just the titles. Beauties like Midnight at the Well of Souls, and The Devil Will Drag You Under, Pirates of the Thunder, and “Forty Days and Nights in the Wilderness” are to die for.
But when—way back in 1978—Jack saw publication of a short story with the absolute killer title, “Dance Band on the Titanic”, everybody wanted to assassinate him. First, because the title was utterly dynamite; and second, because the stupid story was about the dance band on the Titanic!
“No!” we screamed at him, “You great banana, you don’t waste a prime candidate for beautiful allegory on a story that is about the very thing named in the title.” Man was lucky to escape with his life!
For myself, I cannot begin a story until I have a title. Sometimes I have titles—such as “The Deathbird” or “Mefisto in Onyx”—years before I have a story to fit. Often a story will be titled in my mind, be the impetus for writing that particular piece, and then, when I’ve finished, the title no longer resonates properly. It is a title that has not grown to keep pace with more important things in the story, or the focus was wrong, or it was too frivolous for what turned out to be a more serious piece of work. In that case, painful as it may be to disrespect the spark that gave birth to the work, one must be bloody ruthless and scribble the title down for later use, or jettison it completely. That is the mature act of censorship a writer brings to every word of a story, because in a very personal way that is what writing is about: self-censorship. Picking “the” instead of “a” means you not only exclude “a”, but all the possible storylines proceeding from that word. You kill entire universes with every word-choice. And while it’s auctorial censorship, it is a cathexian process forever separating the amateurs from the professionals.
I cannot stress enough the importance of an intriguing and original title. It is what an editor sees first, and what draws that worthy person into reading the first page of the story.
No one could avoid reading a story called “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” or “If You Was a Molkin”, but it takes a masochist to plunge into a manuscript titled “The Wicker Chair”.
I leave you with these thoughts.
Right now I have to write a story called “The Other Eye of Polyphemus”.
EXERCISE
1. Start collecting a list of possible titles for stories. Do any of these spark new story ideas?
2. Come up with three alternative titles for a current project. Include a short one and a long one. Which best suits the heart and soul of your story—hinting at theme without giving anything away, catchy without being too clever?
Ask five or six people to be honest about which of the three titles they find the most intriguing. Include at least two who have read your story, and a few who haven’t.
© 1997 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed 2005 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and The Author’s Agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
PEN DENSHAM
Writing into the Spiritual Unknown
PEN DENSHAM is a writer, producer, director known for writing and producing films such as THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS, BACKDRAFT, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, and television revivals of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, as well as writing, producing, and directing MGM’s MOLL FLANDERS. He has won and been nominated for multiple awards, including two Oscar nominations for his short films.
As a creator I have never pursued a “genre”; instead I have always been drawn to call from myself that which is visionary and most compelling.
I have written and directed a historical character study like MOLL FLANDERS, because I shared having a daughter with my wife and this story seemed to come from needing a way of illustrating to our child that the imperfections that life brings out of us in no way disqualify us from deserving love and admiration.
Harry Houdini fascinated me—a man whose persona was so powerful, that magicians today are still competing with him. And yet he could never find enough adulation to feel that he could value himself. A state of compulsion that I think many artists/performers share.
Over my career, from re-envisioning Robin Hood, a historic adventure, to LARGER THAN LIFE, a Bill Murray movie in which I wrote about a man who inherits an elephant, I have tried to write from my inner inspirations.
I have also been lucky enough to personally champion the re-birth of both The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone to network television. I saw each series as a vast opportunity for myself, and others, to explore human nature under the magnifying focus of a supernatural or science fiction premise. A focus of heated, dramatic light that forced the characters to quickly strip off their protective layers to reveal their inner, human dynamics, and to change and struggle to find choices that evolved their courage in the face of awesome difficulty.
I am in development on one script that truly haunted me, Night-Shifts. It was scary at times during the writing—something I’d never felt before. It is about a young female resident doctor, forced to work dozens of hours, who starts to fear one of her patients trapped in a coma is trying to possess her body. (I lost my mother when I was eight—my father brought psychics to the house and held séances.)
I describe myself as a romantic skeptic, as I have found little evidence of a life after death. Except in the oddly unexplained but well-documented phenomena of the near death and white light experiences—which are universal in history and culture. And they tied back to the warning I was given as a child by one zealous “psychic” that when we sleep: “Our souls float out of our bodies. Be careful, because malicious entities can take them over.”
Joseph Campbell regarded myths as living things, meant to reflect the immediate, social experiences and lives of those who created them . . . I think I was exploring that child in me—who still retained self-protective instincts about not losing control while asleep. Like my young doctor, who finds she is doing bizarre things when she tries to capture a few minutes of recuperative sleep.
I would rather this script be regarded as a modern, dark myth than just a horror story. Somehow defining a film as horror seems to disable its value. “Horror” can be a pejorative that allows one to dispense with its purpose of envisioning the inevitable mystery and cycle of life. I see Night-Shifts as a metaphysical journey that we all can take with Mary, its heroine. And yes, it embraces the dark currents of the horror form. Not for “Gorno” (gore-porn), but to present a series of supernatural possibilities that cause a contemporary heroine to confront the limits of her courage, make discoveries about her past, and come to examine the existence of the human soul.
And, of course, to entertain.
I firmly believe that scary movies work on us because they provoke our natural survival instincts. Films like JURASSIC PARK, ALIEN, and JAWS are what I call “avoidance of being eaten” stories. We are drawn to THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and Dexter because we have anxiety about being killed by serial killers. We watch disaster movies because they play out scenarios that we unconsciously use to calculate strategies that we might use in a similar situation. And movies like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, THE THING, etc., deal with unnatural things that we conjure from our collective unconscious (like demons, goblins, spirits), that we imagine want to harm or possess us. Despite our sophisticated position at the peak of the mammal species, we still have urges and instincts from those six-million-years-ago ape-like creatures that were our ancestors.
EXERCISE
There is a simple creativity tool called Bi-sociation: taking two topics and forcing them together to create a new hybrid that incorporates values from both.
Make a list of twenty movies or scary speculative fiction books that have appealed to you. FINAL DESTINATION—PSYCHO—THE EXORCIST—CARRIE—FRANKENSTEIN—THE OMEN—Dante’s Inferno—ALIEN, etc.
Then have fun and see if you can combine any two, to inspire the plot for new survival-instinct-provoking stories!
EXAMPLES:
THE EXORCIST—meets—Dante’s Inferno
— A priest is chosen to go into Hell to rescue an innocent soul.
ALIEN—meets—THE OMEN
— The Devil possesses people on a space ship.
CARRIE—meets—THE SHINING
High school students are trapped in a snowbound hotel and the girl they haze starts to hunt them down with her powers.
DOUGLAS MCGOWAN
Catching Up with the Future
DOUGLAS MCGOWAN is the co-author of Nature of the Beast: A Graphic Novel. He lives in Oregon where he produces music reissues and runs the Yoga Records and Ethereal Sequence record labels.
I’m often struck by the yawning divide between the fantastic visions of the human imagination and the relatively mundane fantasies put forth by mainstream Hollywood.
In fact, reality often seems to have overtaken fantasy, at least for anyone who follows the latest headlines in science and technology.
Consider: We are perhaps ten or twenty years away from “the singularity,” the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses the real, human thing. It is a moment of epochal significance that should occupy the imaginations of our greatest fantasy writers, and yet future historians—take note we may be talking about robots now—may be surprised by how little this matter seemed to weigh on the collective consciousness in the early part of the twenty-first century. Or they may not be surprised at all, given a presumably omnivorous appetite for data that would make very few things truly surprising.
Yes, there are notable exceptions like GATTACA, the Matrix series, A.I., ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, or MOON—stories that do more than just imagine; they speculate. But in general, it’s not unreasonable to say that we creators aren’t thinking about the future as creatively as we used to.
Pessimism explains much of this. It’s been a tough millennium so far. And seriously visualizing our future can be a scary thing. But we conceive the future first in our minds, then set about creating it. A little pessimism is realistic; too much isn’t just bad news—it’s unsustainable.
Lack of originality is also a huge factor here. Much of the current field of cinematic science fiction seems to extrapolate its ideas less from the real world than it does from other movies and comic books.
If the goal is to create something striking, look anywhere but the movies and pop culture for inspiration for your visionary science fiction ideas.
And if you must use the movies for inspiration, make sure you know what you’re up to—make sure you aren’t just treating someone else’s fiction as some sort of given reality. And yeah, make sure you’re not just lifting from existing works.
If one focuses a little more on the science, the fiction might start to write itself.
EXERCISE
For this exercise, begin by paying closer attention to what is happening on the cutting edge of real world science right now. Subscribe to a blog such as slashdot.com, blogs.scientificamerican.com, or weliveinthef
uture.tumblr.com. Find a story that inspires or connects to some radical idea of the future, and research it more closely.
Now extrapolate the impact of whatever change you see coming. For example, what will it be like growing up in a world of advanced artificial intelligence? How will young people relate with their families, their teachers, and one another when the “voice of authority” comes to them through a seemingly all-knowing smartphone, neural implant, or teddy bear? How will a creative person survive in a world like this? A tutor? A grifter?
Make sure that your idea represents more than just one step from where we are. You may have to create a whole backstory just to explain why an object, a custom, a saying in your fantasy story is the way it is. It can be hard work, but this sort of richness of detail is close to a universal feature of the best science fiction.
Take a story from the present or the past and put it in the future defined by a development you think will affect the way we live. For example, retell your childhood in this new world, or transpose a fairy tale into the world of this new development.
Finally, contrast your sci-fi idea with modern day reality. Explain to yourself, and anyone you count on for criticism, what is truly futuristic about your idea. Draw a line winding from the present moment to whatever future you’re imagining, and prove why it’s more advanced and more compelling than what is already happening at this very moment. If you can do that, you’re probably onto something.
Now Write! Page 17
