Yeah. This pretty much sums up my titling skills.
This also extends to naming-of-characters skills.
Remember that scene in City of Angels when Meg's character suspects Nic's character is non-human? He's cut himself in the kitchen and she notices his skin has healed. Then this approximate conversation ensues:- What's your name?
- Seth
- Seth What?
- Seth Plate.
Yeaaaaaaaaah, that's me, too, when it comes to names. I glance around and whatever hits my line of sight ends up as a name.
My boring blog title posts? My name + verb + theme.
See a pattern there?
I think I'm a very creative premise writer. I don't know why I'm so blah at other things. For me, creativity isn't an all reaching force infecting every part of my life. I'm not a creative person.
I can't draw. Art very rarely is viewed as anything but "pretty" or "eh." I stay within industry fashion lines. My home's design depends on symmetry. My plots are carefully excel-spreadsheeted out before each story. I follow Vogler's 12 step journey to a T. And my titles are very obvious.
It takes all kinds to write a book. Hopefully there's enough room in publishing for my kind of creative - the very neat, orderly kind. The kind that can't come up with decent blog titles. The kind that can't even figure out a creative way to end this post.
4 comments:
I s*ck at titles, seriously. I use the phone book for people's names and I also use names culled from reference materials. However, you are extremely creative and your premises kick a**. :)
Don't worry Martha! Being brilliant with titles is a specific sort of creativity -- marketing creativity. And those guys don't seem very happy (though maybe that's just Mad Men and not REAL ad men and women!).
I'm really lousy at titles too. It's a specialized skill, like cutting diamonds. I liek to think us title-impaired people are stone setters instead of stone cutters, that's all :)
Mysti
huh. the thing is, i thought that title was great. I mean - KIM ELDER DIES - could you *really* improve on that?
- though i was the person who had to write sixty titles before my publisher was happy :)
SIXTY TITLES????????? For crying out loud, Soph! I don't think I've thought up sixty titles in my entire life for my entire life's work. Wow.
Lisa - I'm off to get a phone book.
Oh Mysti - I took marketing in college. Sigh. I'm an all around failure!!
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