179 Ways to Save a Novel by Peter Selgin

Author:Peter Selgin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Titles & What They Tell Us

89}WHAT’S IN A TITLE:

MYTHICAL SNAKES IN THE GRASS

As with a first sentence, a title raises expectations. When those expectations aren’t met, readers may be left unsatisfied. On the other hand, when writers must struggle to title their stories, it’s often an indication that they haven’t yet found the central metaphor or meaning of what they’ve written.

A student titles his story “Sucker Punched.” A sucker punch is an unexpected blow, an assault that catches its victim off guard, a definitive but fiendish clout that leaves no room for argument or fair play. A cheap shot.

Sometimes (the story tells us) fate deals the sucker punch. His breath smelling of booze, Ava’s drunken father teaches his daughter to throw a sucker punch as a means of defending herself against the bully who for weeks has been tormenting her at school. But Ava’s dad is oblivious to the even crueler blow dealt by fate to his offspring in saddling her with an irresponsible, alcoholic, inadvertently harmful father: himself.

Here, theme and story are perfectly wed. And—like those little thermometers that come with frozen turkeys to tell you when they’re cooked—the title “pops.”

In other cases, our titles tell us that our stories aren’t fully baked. In “Eurydice’s Shadow,” a woman who once aspired to be a concert pianist has sacrificed that dream at the altar of motherhood. Louise is married to a benevolent but distant man, saddled with children she can barely tolerate, and locked away in a provincial rural setting far from the cities where she might have pursued her musical dreams (and possibly a little romance on the side).

At least Emma Bovary could have an affair! But Louise’s plight is familiar not only through classic works like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but contemporary ones like Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (and the film based on it)—or novels by popular contemporary authors like Barbara Taylor Bradford, who specializes in stories of women trapped in dreary marriages and “willing to pay any price” (to quote one dust jacket blurb) “for their dreams.”

The exhausted theme here gets a facelift through its title, which refers to the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, a couple who were inseparable in their love until one day Eurydice was bitten by a serpent and cast down to Hades. To rescue her, Orpheus appeals to the overseer of the underworld with his lyre, playing a tune so sweet and moving he is allowed to descend and reclaim her, but only on one condition: Orpheus must not look back; he must trust that Eurydice is following him out of Hades. At the last moment, of course, Orpheus breaks his vow and looks back, and Eurydice is snatched back into the underworld.

Here, wrapped like a mummy in a myth thousands of years old, is the story-within-the-story—not yet unraveled by its author. Instead we get the static tableau of a character trapped in a dead marriage, when what’s called for is a character trapped in a dead marriage who does something about it, or tries to, and pays a price.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.