I'll go first and let you in on how this blog was named. It was inspired primarily by my night-owl life-style. Social media might be of particular help to northern writers, as we are far removed from the publishing centres of the country and networking with other writers is perhaps more difficult for us. So thinking of “northern” and “night,” I thought of “Knight Rider,” (the 1980s television series), and that morphed into “night writer” and the blog was named. In about 43 seconds.
About 150 years ago, many non-fiction books carried very long titles. The title was, in fact, a whole description in a very straight-forward way of what the book was about. I'm glad to say that has changed.
Fiction titles have more often been shorter and some have even been catchy. I won't hesitate to mention two of my favourite right here: Pamela by Samuel Richardson and Middlemarch by George Eliot. The first one takes its name from the protagonist and the second, from the community in which the story takes place (although the protagonist in this one spends time in other locations).
What about poetry books? Well, it's a dog's breakfast out there. Some titles are enigmatic, to say the least. Others are symbolic; some take their name from one of the poems in the book.
I'd like to hear from you. How do you pick a title for a poem? If you have a book of poems, or a novel, how did you pick the title?
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I have always had trouble with titles. The titles of my two poetry books were actually conceived by other people. Sometimes I end up using the first line of a poem for my title. Interestingly, though, I sometimes think up titles without poems to attach them to. I used to make a list of titles I would like for books or poems, but they never matched the book or poem itself. With one exception. I used to think "Fungus Love" was a good title. A few years later I wrote an ode to Fungus and a match was born. That's the only time though.
ReplyDeleteSometimes a word or phrase pops into my head and I know right then that I want to write a poem about that thing or feeling or experience. Then, I build the poem from the ground up (from just that word or phrase), or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I build it from the top (title) down!
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