What Should I Call This? (On Titles)
The Rambling Introduction
I recently went camping (okay, Airstream-glamping) with my artist mom for Mother’s Day weekend. We enjoyed some quality nature time as I read and she did quick gouache paintings in her sketchbook. I’ve always loved the physicality of painting, how you can stick the process and the final work next to one another as in the photo above. The painting on the right would not have been possible without the messy gathering of all the colors on the left. I’m trying to remember this in my writing: first, just get the stuff out on the page (my “palette”). Then comes the puzzling of all that material into something cohesive. (When I showed my mom the above photo, she said, “That’s so great! That makes it look like I had a plan or something.”)
I’m pretty okay with this whole process—the collection of materials and the fashioning of the materials into a form. What I struggle with is coming up with titles for the formed materials. On the one hand, shouldn’t the work speak for itself? On the other, the title contains the formed materials, making them officially cohesive—not to mention it’s usually the first impression on the reader/viewer/audience. I tend to have the feeling that my work is not validated until it’s titled, even if this is a bit superficial.
In my writing process, titles are the final piece of the puzzle—except that once I arrive at a title, it requires a reorganization of the rest of the puzzle. I write my way into figuring out what my title is, and once I have a title, I know what I’m really writing about. (This may be why I still have trouble with outlining, but I’m working on it.)
The Part That Gets to the Point
Always a fan of a deep dive (only the metaphorical kind), I researched how artists title their projects—both currently and historically. Some writer friends told me they start out with a title—even if that title changes—because they wouldn’t know what they were writing otherwise. Others said the title usually comes at the end. Some described titling as being so late in the creative process that they don’t consider it part of the process at all. My artist sister (who you can read about in an earlier post) said she doesn’t usually title any of her work—unless she’s submitting it to something, in which case the title is exactly what the image is of.
Ernest Hemingway made lists of possible titles only after he’d finished writing a story or book. Margaret Atwood said about titles: “I come by them, much as you come by some unexpected object in a junk store or lying beside the road.” This is what happened with The Handmaid’s Tale, which was called “Offred” until page 110 of writing.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney used place-holder titles, too. “Yesterday” was referred to as “Scrambled Eggs” until better lyrics were written, and a song called “It’s Not Too Bad” eventually became “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
Titles aren’t always written by the artist, and there’s often a marketing component. F. Scott Fitzgerald was never happy with the title “The Great Gatsby,” for example. He’s still one of my favorite writers, but the man actually thought “Trimalchio in West Egg” was a better option.
Anyway, a deep dive isn’t a deep dive unless you go back to the beginning, so here’s a little titling history I dug up:
Music
The oldest notated song in existence is Hurrian Hymn No. 6, composed in cuneiform around 14th-century BCE on a clay tablet that was excavated in Syria in the 1950s. The clay tablet doesn’t include a title. (It’s “Hurrian” because it was composed by the Hurrian people, “hymn” because the words praise a god, and “No. 6” because that’s how it was catalogued upon excavation among other hymn fragments).
Composed about 1500 years later, the Epitaph of Seikilos is the oldest musical composition to have survived in its entirety (the Hurrian Hymn is only a melody). The Epitaph of Seikilos was inscribed on an ancient marble column. Like the Hurrian Hymn, it wasn’t found with a title, but its inscription says, “I am a tombstone, an image. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance.” So, it’s kind of still saying, “Here’s what I’m about,” which is sort of title-y.
Anyone who's ever taken a western music history class knows what comes next: centuries of chant. Because secular music was typically passed down through aural tradition and not recorded, most of the music available to us from this period was written for that record-keeper of all record-keepers, the Catholic Church. These musical works were labeled as their roles in the Mass: Introits, Alleluias, Glorias. Not titles, exactly, but words that told you what a work’s purpose was.
Finally, we get to some knowledge of secular music—and some actual titles show up. Titles like “The Song of Roland,” written in 11th-century France, and “Rose, liz” (meaning “Rose, lily”), composed by Guillaume de Machaut in 14th-century Italy. Both of these titles are pretty straightforward: The Song of Roland is a song about Roland (a military leader under Charlemagne) and “Rose, liz” are simply the first words of the song. (Titles comprised of words from the work itself are still a go-to option in music and poetry today—think Prince’s “Purple Rain” or Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” Why come up with extra words when the best words are right there?)
In the era of classical music, just about everything was called sonata, concerto, minuet, and a host of other Italian words for musical forms. It’s worth noting that many of these words emerged from dance—“minuet” and “waltz” were titles of dances before it was ever okay to write one for a very-much-non-dancing pianist. Nearly everything I’ve ever played as a classical pianist has been titled “[Musical form] No. [number] in [key].” But stuff started getting pretty nickname-y near the end of this era. For example, have you heard of Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor? Probably not, but you might know it by its nickname, “Für Elise.”
Can you imagine if I gave my writing titles like “Novel No. 1” and “Short Story No. 29”? Maybe the world of literature will be different then, right?
Literature
Nope! Here we’re still pretty much just calling things what they are. The oldest literature we know of is the Epic of Gilgamesh (2000 BCE, ancient Mesopotamia) and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1550 BCE). The Epic of Gilgamesh was titled upon discovery, but the Egyptian Book of the Dead had its own title. Its original Egyptian title translates closer to “Book of Emerging Forth into the Light.” Doesn’t that sound much more beautiful?
Around the 8th century BCE we have Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. If you think those are interesting titles, they’re not. “Iliad” is derived from “Ilias poiesis” or “poem of Ilion,” and Ilion was the ancient name for the city of Troy, so “Iliad” just means “Poem of Troy.” Similarly, “Odyssey” just means “story of Odysseus.” However, The Odyssey is pretty cool because it’s the first example of a title being so important that it became a regular word in the dictionary; other examples of this are Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the 1944 film Gaslight.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses right around the first century might be the first example of an interesting literary title, as it refers to a theme rather than the literal subject. However, you could argue that Metamorphoses is the subject as well as the theme, which only proves my point that it’s more interesting than “Poem of Troy.”
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was also in existence by this time. Its title in Chinese is “Sunzi Bing-fa” or “Master Sun’s Military Methods.” The word “Bing-fa” may more accurately refer to diplomacy than war. This brings me back to the question of why we changed the beautiful “Book of Emerging Forth into the Light” into the dark “Egyptian Book of the Dead.” It’s worth considering how European colonizers have controlled the narrative of world history by simply altering—yep!—titles.
(In other words, titles hold a lot of power.)
Art
Did you know that before the eighteenth century, paintings generally didn’t have titles? This is because artists were painting murals and frescoes, and if you were experiencing art you were likely doing so in the home of the person who owned it, so there was someone around to explain it. But art was also expected to depict familiar stories—European art was all about the Bible, frescoes in India illustrated stories from Buddha’s life, Maya art usually depicted royalty or supernatural beings, and Ute rock art recorded tribal history and maps of hunting areas. This meant that viewers could easily understand what they were looking at.
(Michelangelo’s David might be my favorite example of art speaking for itself due to familiar subject matter. I love the idea of people looking at that beautiful naked man sculpture and just knowing, “Yep, that’s David.” Side note: did you know that Michelangelo was freaking in his twenties when he sculpted that?)
In Europe, once art became mobile (canvases! easels! travel! galleries!) and there was greater geographical distance between viewer and artist, titles became necessary to ensure that the viewer “got it.” Jean-Baptiste Du Bos wrote in 1719: “Sometimes the greatest masters have judged two or three words necessary in order to render the subjects of their works intelligible.”
All this to say: Leonardo da Vinci did not come up with the title “Mona Lisa,” nor did Johannes Vermeer call his painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” These were titled later on by people other than the artist. However, you can be sure that Gustave Courbet titled his own scandalous L’Origine du monde in the 1800s and Frida Kahlo can take the credit for the lovely Me and My Parrots (Yo y mis pericos) in the 1900s.
And then there are artists whose titles manage to be compelling for what they leave out. John Singer Sargent’s famous painting of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau got a whole lot more attention after he vengefully changed its title to Madame X. And Edward Hopper kept things simple with titles like “Gas” and “Automat.”
Perhaps taking a cue from the music world, in the 1940s Jackson Pollack began titling his paintings with numbers instead of words, beginning with “Number 1, 1948.” His wife said this was because “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a painting for what it is.” Pollack wasn’t the first or only artist to use a numbering system. Georgia O’Keeffe had lots of number titles, such as her painting “Music, Pink and Blue No. 2” painted in 1918—a more direct homage to music titling.
Film
Technically, the earliest motion picture is the 2.11-second 1888 film Roundhay Garden Scene, which is a pretty literally descriptive title. Since then, film titles—unlike titles in other mediums—have developed into their own art-form-within-an-art-form. For this we can thank graphic designer Saul Bass, who revolutionized the experience of opening titles in the 1950s by making the titles move (!). Bass believed that titles at the beginning of a film ought to “create a climate for the story that was about to unfold.” He designed titles for everything from The Seven Year Itch to West Side Story to Psycho.
And, yeah, can we talk about how good of a title “Psycho” is? The first third of the movie—in which nothing remotely scary happens—is terrifying because of the title alone. Movie titles—like any good title—can pull a lot of weight. Recent favorites that come to mind are Promising Young Woman and Parasite. Another fun example is Snakes on a Plane, a movie that Samuel L. Jackson agreed to star in based solely on the title. When the studio changed the title to Pacific Air 121 so as not to “give too much away,” Jackson replied:
“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR F---ING MINDS?! That's EXACTLY what you want to do! How else are you going to get people into the movie? Nobody wants to see Pacific Air 121. That's like saying Boat to Heaven. People either want to see this movie or they don't. So let 'em know: If you're coming to see this movie, you're going to see a plane full of deadly-ass snakes.”
I’d Better Wrap This Up
Most essentially, titles are simply words we use to refer to the collection of materials that is a work of art. But, on the creative level, they can also tell you a variety of things:
what to literally expect: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Prelude in C-sharp minor, 4’33”, Toy Story, and Adaptation are all titles that label exactly what you’re about to experience. (Though, I would argue that Adaptation does a little more work than that. Also, how good of a title is “Toy Story”? Straight to the point: a story about toys. You either like it or you don’t—but you do, because who doesn’t like toys?)
inform you who you’re about to spend time with: The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, Emma, Sula, Juno, Gilmore Girls, and Hamilton are examples of this. And have you ever noticed that Disney movie titles are almost always character-driven? The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Lion King—all of these titles let you know who you care about before you even meet them. Brilliant.
tell you what’s going on: Star Wars and Sex and the City are straightforward titles that let you know what kind of chaos you’re dropping in on. There Will Be Blood literally tells you what’s coming, and Love in the Time of Cholera hands you a story arc and a setting all at once. Get Out makes it clear that you’re heading into something that requires escape, Breaking Bad is not kidding around, and Bridesmaids practically contains the whole story.
set the tone for your experience: These ones get even more fun. Think: The Blob, Tender is the Night, Kind of Blue, Darkness on the Edge of Town, Clueless, Home Alone, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Freaks and Geeks, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Superbad, Arrested Development, Stranger Things, In Cold Blood, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Paradise by the Dashboard Light. All perfect tone encapsulators. Oh, and how great is Jaws? The movie hasn’t even started and you already have something to be afraid of.
pique your interest: These are titles that make you go, “Huh?” and, subsequently, “I need to know more.” My favorite example is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? because it’s one question that contains so many others (Who is Baby Jane? Why is she called Baby Jane? What did happen to her? Why doesn’t the narrator even know?). Other examples are Hills Like White Elephants, 1984, Atlas Shrugged, Fatal Attraction, Silence of the Lambs, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fleabag, and Lemonade.
or some combination of all the above: In fact, most of the examples I’ve listed do more than one job.
These are all important aspects to think about when it comes to titling your projects. How do you want your title to direct your audience’s attention? What do you want to give them first? Do you want them to have a theme? A character? An image? A question? Essentially: how do you want to begin your relationship?
(And, as with any relationship, try not to be misleading.)
Here’s Saul Bass’s classic title sequence to Psycho. (Music by Bernard Herrmann.)
Struggling to title your stuff? These are helpful titling guides and inspiration for screenwriting and poetry, with tips that can apply to all kinds of writing.
I can’t end without a shout-out to the queen of snarky titles and the woman whose words are the title of this whole blog. Therefore, I leave you with Dorothy Parker’s aptly titled poems Unfortunate Coincidence and News Item.
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