Some years ago, I was beginning a book about the women’s basketball team at Gallaudet University, the renowned school for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Washington, D.C., when I ran into a vexing problem: I could not think of a good title for it. I did what I normally do when it comes to title-hunting, which is get a yellow legal pad and just start riffing on words or idioms or ideas that might capture the essence of the project in a catchy way. If you write enough things down and play with them, in my experience something good often bubbles up. It took little time to have twenty-five possibilities, but almost all of them were awful. And I do mean awful. A few were flat and boring, others trite, but most of them just tried way too hard. The Best Team You’ve Never Heard of. Quiet In the Gym. Playing Out Loud. Those aren’t good, and they were actually some of the better ones. I kept at it, but the longer I did, and the more I forced it, the worse the titles became.
So I let it rest for awhile and one afternoon, on a cool spring day, I went for a run in the nature preserve near our house. I wasn’t thinking about anything but being on the trails, with trees beginning to bloom and meadows starting to smell sweet and earthy after months of cold. My attention was on the sound of my breathing and the cadence of my stride, and then, not even a half-mile into a 5K loop, these words drifted into my consciousness, like a plane pulling a banner behind it:
WINNING SOUNDS LIKE THIS.
https://www.waynecoffeyauthor.com/book/winning-sounds-like-this/
That was it. My title hunt was over. Just like that. To this day, I have no idea where it came from, or why it arrived when it did. I am a spiritual person, but do I think that God stopped what He was doing in that moment to drop a book title on me? No, I do not. All I knew is that I loved it, and my editor and everyone else I shared it with felt the same way, and thwas important because the book wound up being one of the most special projects I’ve ever undertaken, even if it did not set the bestseller list on fire. For me it was a fresh reminder that forcing solutions, forcing most anything, almost never achieves the desired result. It’s true when you have a round peg and a square hole, and I think it’s especially true in the realm of creativity. Even after decades as a professional writer, I often have a hard time writing the first sentence, whether it’s for an article or an essay or a book. When this goes on for awhile, frustration builds and self-critical voices start to chirp, and I inevitably will ratchet up the pressure by telling myself that if I ever actually get something on my computer screen, it dang well better be the best first sentence I’ve ever written. It better be a brilliant and compelling foreshadowing of all of the story’s elements, an all-timer that will be studied in writing classes for years to come. This is what I do – and this is what I mean by forcing a solution - and it never works. Never. In fact, it only beats me down. Do you know when the first sentence does get written? When I stop forcing it and just write a sentence, that’s when. Once I spoke to a therapist friend about writer’s block and this pressure I inflict on myself to be perfect.
“What if you ask yourself, ‘What would be a sentence?’” he said. That was it – the sum total of his wisdom. I was quiet for a few moments as I thought about it. What would be a sentence? It doesn’t have to be a sentence I wind up using. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly good sentence. But it is a sentence, a strand of words with a subject and predicate, and the screen is no longer blank. Lowering my expectations, freeing myself to just write one dumb old sentence . . . and sometimes that is all that it takes to get the machinery in gear.
The great Mexican writer Octavio Paz put it in a much more elegant way:
“'Writing is a curse. The worst part of it is the anguish that precedes the act of writing -- the hours, days or months when we search in vain for the phrase that turns the spigot that makes the water flow. Once that first phrase is written, everything changes: the process is enthralling, vital and enriching, no matter what the final result is. Writing is a blessing!''
(If you are scoring Nobel Prizes at home, it’s Octavio Paz 1, Coffey Grounds 0. Now you know why.)
To circle back to titles, I’ve always felt the process of finding them is much more art than science. In early 2010s, I worked with R.A. Dickey, the knuckleball pitcher for the New York Mets and 2012 National League Cy Young Award winner, on his autobiography. We struggled to come up with a title for that book, too, which was about his itinerant baseball career and his awakening to childhood trauma, and then one day (not on the trails this time, but again when I wasn’t thinking about it), it descended on me:
WHEREVER I WIND UP: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and The Perfect Knuckleball.
Bingo. We have a winner.
Titles are funny things. They remind me of the famous quote from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, 60 years ago, when he struggled to define pornography but said, “I know it when I see it.” I can’t define what makes for a good title, but I absolutely can tell you when I see one. Sometimes it’s the flow of the words that makes it work, or a lyrical quality, or a jarring juxtaposition. Sometimes it is something else entirely. Here are 1o of my favorites:
The Sun Also Rises
Gone With the Wind
To Kill a Mockingbird
Cloudy, With a Chance of Meatballs
Pride and Prejudice
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Secret Life of Bees
The Boys of Winter *
(*Denotes shameless self-promotion, but what can I say? I like the title.)
*
Before we go, I want to give a shoutout to a newspaper headline that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer a day or two ago. Newspaper headlines are a close cousin to book titles, and they are also close to my heart, and they get even closer when they dress up a story written by Alex Coffey, award-winning writer and world-class daughter. Alex wrote a wonderful feature on Frankie (Two Scoops) Mazzuca, an 82-year-old Philadelphia lifer who has been manning the ice cream station in the Phillies’ pressbox cafeteria for 25 years. Here’s the front page from that day:
The Paperbag Princess