Titles
September 2019 Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

Titles are the face or facade of a story or article. They sometimes reveal important clues about an article or story and are often difficult to come up with when crafting a good tale. What are the requirements for a good title? Does it have reveal or foreshadow something? Or is it meant to pull the reader in? You know tickle a reader´s apetite and draw them to th e story hook, or can it be or seem random? (The way the film Citizen Kane could easily have been called Rosebud.)

Well. A title is all those things. Think of the classic A Tale Of Two Cities. The title reveals that the story is blockbuster in scale among books (classic literature no less) taking place in London and Paris during a tumultuous time of revolution in France and the approaching birth of industry. The characters are caught up in all these currents and the title hints at all that. What a beautiful story it is.

What if authors started writing books and writers started writing articles with completely random titles? Would that work with readers? Keep in mind that another thing that titles do is draw attention to the themes in the story. So getting random titles to work on a document might come across as a joke. Some readers might find it frustrating but all in all it would be an interesting trend. Imagine a great film like Blade Runner being called Arificial Snakes or Ethnic Food. That might be too random for people but what if it weren`t? What if trends had changed enough so it became the norm? That would be a interesting trend some might call rebelious.

John

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