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Obscure Titles Tricky Titles And Obscurity What utilitarian role does a book title provide? I would contend there are four that I look for in my own titles: 1. Grab the Reader—choose more like Demon Copperhead than I Was A St. Louis Steampunk Zombie. 2. Portend the Major Theme—if your book is about spies, then choose by global conflict and not by thing (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy rather than Peanuts and Eggcups). 3. Deliver the Book’s Aesthetic—if you’re writing a book abou

The Title Starts The Journey Let’s make an experiment that could lead you to choosing an excellent title for your own novel. Prize winning book titles can be all over the map (or the language, as it were). There are certainly times when we are beset by a formula. Take one of my least favorite—books titled [Profession]’s [Relative], e.g. The Bookie’s Illegitimate Nephew. Yes, I made that one up. Here’s a list starting in 2005, an 11 year sample. There are some great writers on

A larger-than-life character and a moment of cowardice When you buy a book, do you use the Amazon book description (full of soft ambiguous words), or the jacket copy (a torrid one hundred words), or a friend’s recommendation, or the New Yorker 3,000 word review? Consider the first lines instead. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Grab the Character If you are writing a book about A person, the best decision may b

How Droll Is That? Shopping for a new book? The author will have put her most work into the first lines and the last. Pay attention, and perhaps you’ll buy the book you want. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Don't follow (a Writer's Digest) Formula. This Isn’t Kansas Anymore Let the reader think they are in the regular universe, and then throw in a shock so that they are disoriented and asking, Where the hell

Consider the First Lines This is not one of those formulaic pieces of advice where you are exhorted to include two or four or five key elements in your first sentence in order to have a winning start to your book. Writers Digest tells you to use direction, (no static) characterization, distinctive voice, and basic plot (conflict), but then, they are into pat answers. Instead, there is a list of examples that could be used as deep reads—how did the author do that? First lines

Consider the First Line

Geek With Exploding Brain Literary Devices 101 Resource: www.literaryterms.net The Big Four: Metaphor – conditional equivalence. Henry II was a mighty lion. Simile – so, as, like, than Aphorism – a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle Analogy – Peter De Vries, comparing the unknowable universe to a safe, wrote, “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." Next Rank Tool

The Song: “ I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – The Low Anthem The Lyric: Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps A small city hanging off the bluffs above the Mississippi, where the only place to leave to is worse than the place to leave from . My town, it damns me as much as I curse it. My dreams were lost between middle school and high school, my innocence in the slip between desire and abuse, my virginity in a sexually trans

The Gate Opens, But Not For You “ I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – Song By The Low Anthem Mary Ann, I am the ticket taker This is what I do. The gate opens, but probably not for you, Mary Ann. You’re not the one lucky today. You don’t have a degree from a hyphenated private college. Neither did you intern for a Congressman, or spend that semester in Bologne. Your father has never purchased a Senator, and you’ve never ever been invited to the Governor’s Man

Why Are They Just Sitting There? Every writer goes down to the DoItYourself for story ideas. For some, it’s the obituaries DIY, for some it’s the Police Blotter DIY, but they come home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a trowel. But then for all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber to build the story out. Here’s your observation: You’re late driving back from Albuquerque up through the Native American Reservations to your house In Taos. You didn’t get

Visitors Every writer goes down to the DoItYourself for story ideas. For some, it’s the obituaries DYI, for some it’s the Police Blotter DYI, but they come home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a trowel. For all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber to build the story out. Here’s your observation: You are marching along a suburban street, looking for a house number. When you find it, the house is revealed as a Craftsman style bungalow, very out of cha

“ I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – The Low Anthem In a small wooden booth at the edge of the fairgrounds, I take the coins and dispense the tickets, regaling those shuffling hoards lined up before me with stories about the attractions they yearn to see, snippets of weather prediction, and praise for the little town and its beautiful women. I am their ticket taker. Come one come all, into the fairgrounds of spectacle, the tents of portent, the cages of an

Every writer goes down to the DIY. For some, the DIY is the obituaries, for some it’s the Police Report, for some it’s the family Thanksgiving dinner. The writer comes home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a sack of nails. For all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber. Here’s your observation. You’re on the backroad 285 from Tres Piedres, New Mexico to Espanola, bicycling. You’re near a place that your phone names as “No Agua.” You pull over to stretc

Feel like the Hottest Couple in Town? Life's sweet, but will it last? You've scribbled down a list of your offsets, the rough that complements smooth, the passive that correlates with the pugnacious. You two resemble a folded inkblot. Delve deeper – we have just the guide. Choose the answer that most suits your personality – and watch your lovie's psyche unfold. My idea of nature is Watching Blue Planet II on TV Weeding the front flower beds Biking on the boardwalk Hiking up

Write Into Realms AI Can’t Follow Bluntly, here is my premise. Probability Engines (AI) can’t write beautifully. They are fed too much crap, and they can only produce the literary equivalent of tapioca. So write into the beauty, move to the country where the actual language matters, and provide an emotional and aesthetic experience that the reader needs. The reader, or at least the one that matters, will walk away from PE pulp and turn to you. Let me give you some examples. F

It’s Only Zeros and Ones MFA programs are inadvertently designed for hostile takeover by Probability Engines, because at the lowest level they teach dogma and Rules. [Of course you’ve heard “Be creative. Learn the rules and then break them judiciously.”] Probability Engines love rules. They reverse-INVENT the rules from the thousands and millions of texts upon which they have trained. They need the guardrails, the connect-the-dots, the predictability. More precisely, they inv

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.” OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and