Titular Titles

Whenever I am writing and come across a question I’m not sure how to answer I turn to Google, which leads me to blogs.  In my internet perusals I usually jump back and forth between suggestions and pages until I come up with a twisted mixture of advice that leads to an idea.  So my idea was that if I thought about it long enough and hard enough I would come up with an awe inspiring title that would knock my socks off, and I have nothing.  I have a swimming mass of thoughts that is producing no usable ideas.  I even briefly considered naming it “Porpoises on Pelican Reef” even though none of those things are in my book.  I found a blog that essential suggests writing down every word that could ever be associated with your book and mixing and matching.

I started doing that and mostly came up with words of titles I already considered using, and then I came up with the brilliant idea to thesaurus all those words which would presumably at least double my word options

skedaddle is in there because it makes me smile

 

In doing the above I came up with words and ideas that I hadn’t thought of before so it was definitely positive and helpful.

Another suggestion in that article that I found particularly helpful was to go to amazon and look at other books in your genre to see how they are titled.  For my book I was considering “Adventures on Tiger Island” because its an adventure book set on a place I call Tiger Island.  The problem is when its compared to other Young Adult Fiction Adventure Sci/fi titles it looks the title of a children’s book, and it is not a children’s book.  So mental note, not a good enough title.

I imagine that people with thought evoking and amazing titles are just better at writing than I am at the moment.  Which is not meant to be a slam on me but a nod to the fact that it takes time and what I consider some brain training to get your mind to automatically think in a way that is catchy in creative.

Has anyone else had this trouble?? There must be more of us because there are a ton of blog posts out there about this but let me know your thoughts!

First I read and then I read and then I read some more

I just posted my reading list under the about tab at the top of the blog. This is not a list of everything I have read but just of the things I have read that appear on the reading list I am going off of. Some I love and some I loath but they have all influenced me in their own way

1984 by George Orwell
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
Emma by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (cheated and only read half but I will never try again)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Anyone else out there have favorites in the list above?? For me Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice stand out above the rest.

See the unread part of the list under the about tab!

Happy 200th Pride and Prejudice!

I love this book so much that every time I find it in a new cover I buy it.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Pride and Prejudice is the single most influential book I have ever read.  I first read it in the fourth grade and I have read it at least once a year since then.

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

(and on occasion I hate the fourth grade version of myself for getting to read it with the fresh eyes of not knowing what happens next).

“I might as well inquire,” replied she, “why with so evident a desire of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?“

Elizabeth Bennet is who I and so many other young women have wanted to be and Mr. Darcy is the man we wished we could fall in love with.

“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.“

Jane Austen gave us all a gift that I hope I continue to appreciate for the rest of my life

“The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.”