The Art of Nuanced Titles

This is another writing topic, for those who are keeping track. But I seem to be on a roll these days.

My topic today is nuanced titles and the art of creating them. What I mean by this is best explained by a series of plays I wrote as Nigel Cross (written with Allen Amundsen...who at one time actually was reading my blog, so who knows, maybe I'll get a shout out from him). One of the titles we created was called Without A Net, a play about two guys who meet on the Golden Gate Bridge while one is contemplating "hurling himself into a watery death". The title was nuanced because as the story goes on, the character who wants to jump keeps saying, "I'm jumping because I'm without a net." You find out later that what he is really saying is "I'm jumping because I realize I'm without Annette." Annette was the woman who dumped him, causing him to finally decide to end his life.

We revisited the nuanced title thing again and again, like our story "Be the Monkey", which is about two actors putting on a play called Monkey Boy. The nuance is a little more subtle this time around, but I won't go into the particulars, other than to say that it works out that the name is important to the story. Later on, we wrote "Splitting Adam", which is about two brothers who haven't spoken in years. I based the title off of the nuclear family, which then leads to the thought of "Splitting Atom(s)", which leads to the nuance I'm talking about.

Later titles I played around with came in other plays, like "Hostage Play", where a group of previous characters take over the play until the playwright decides to "end" the stories they were in previously, thus taking the play hostage. It seems that I've had a lot of fun with titles over the years because nuance really seems to be almost as important as the story itself. My latest short story that was published was titled "Buried Memories", and it had as much to do with memories as a tree that was planted that contained the memories of an important event shared between the two main characters of the story.

Recently, I've been updating a story I wrote years ago called "Killing Robert Shaw", which is probably one of the most powerful stories I've ever written about a doctor who administers the final lethal injections on death row and sees the actor Robert Shaw each time he kills a patient (because you later find out the actor looked identical to the man who killed his wife and daughter and got away with it).

I don't think a lot of people think enough about nuanced titles anymore, but sometimes they can be really powerful. I've seen it used recently in some great movies, such as Babel. After you watch the movie, you can probably sit for about an hour and ruminate on the title alone.

Anyway, my latest novel is called Plato's Perspective, and I'm sure you can imagine it is filled with all sorts of nuance in the title alone. I'll pretty much leave it at that for now.

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