Collected Columns by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn [Michael Frayn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571328901
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Making a name for yourself

Writing a novel, as any novelist will tell you, is hard. Writing a short story, as any short story writer will be eager to add, is harder still. The shorter the form the harder it gets. Poems are hell. Haiku are hell concentrated into seventeen syllables.

Until finally you get down to the shortest literary form of all, which is the title of whatever it is you’re writing. Long-distance novelists who can happily write several thousand words a day for months on end then go into creative agonies when the time comes to compose the two or three words that will go on the spine. Battle-hardened samurai of the haiku take instruction from Zen masters before they attempt to extract an odd syllable out of their hard-won seventeen to go in the index.

This year, for various reasons, four different works of mine have reached the point where they need titles, and I’ve reached the point where I need hospitalisation. It’s not that I can’t write titles. I’ve written far more titles than anything else in my life. For one of these four projects I have 107 titles. For another – 74. For the third – 134. 134 titles! For one short book! 134 pretty good titles, though I say so myself. The trouble is you don’t want 134 pretty good titles. You want one perfect title.

No titles at all so far for the fourth project, but this is because I haven’t written the thing yet. Though after the agonies I’ve had with the other three I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t write the title of this one first, then dash down a few thousand words to fit it.

The curious thing is that you usually do have a title first. You have the working title, that you put on the front of the file when you begin, just so that you know which file’s which. The working title, as its name suggests, works. That’s to say, it actually succeeds in telling you which file’s which, and it does it without being pretentious, or facetious, or unintentionally obscene. But the publisher, or the producer, or whoever it is, doesn’t like it. Your agent doesn’t like it – your partner doesn’t like it. No one likes it. This may be because they don’t know about it – you haven’t told them. You know you can’t use the working title. Life has to be harder than that.

One of the troubles with a list of 134 titles is that it offers odds of at least 133 to 1 against getting it right. I’ve got it wrong many times in the past. There’s only one novel of mine that anyone ever remembers – and for all practical purposes it’s called The One About Fleet Street, because even the people who remember the book can’t remember the title I gave it. I wrote another book called Constructions. I think I realised even before publication that I’d picked a dud here, when my own

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