Sometimes an essay or short story of mine starts with a title, sometimes the title emerges quickly and seems obvious, and sometimes the title is like that doorway in a nightmare that just keeps moving further and further down an endless corridor.
Okay, maybe not as terrible as that, but it’s bad enough when you feel you’ve written something solid yet the title doesn’t seem to work at all. There’s a brutal disconnect and how do you fix it?
I’ve recently had an essay accepted that was a chameleon in terms of the title. Almost every time it was rejected, I broke a rhetorical bottle of champagne on its bow and sent it off on a new voyage, re-christened.
So it has been, in no chronological order: “The Bully Year,” “My Year of the Bully,” “The Teacher Who Tried to Silence Me,” “Stupid,” “The Dumb Row,” “She Tried to Burn Me Down,” “Fifth Grade Hell,” “Fifth Grade Fear,” “What I Lost in Fifth Grade,” “She Tried to Crush Me,” “Lost and Found,” “Losing My Voice,” “Shut Out,” “Hard Times” and “Who Says I Can’t Sing?”
Picking up any themes?
Well, surveying all of these recently as I prepared to submit the essay once again—because I was convinced it was good—Charles Dickens came to mind and I stuck with “Hard Times.”
Success.
Since the height of the pandemic, Lev Raphael has had 95 essay and short story publications, online and in print. He’s the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and has seen his work appear in a dozen languages.
1st Image by Pexels from Pixabay
2nd Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
Based on your trial titles, methinks your fifth grade teacher was the twin sister of my fifth grade teacher!
I kind of like "The Dumb Year."