Luc Reid

It was about 10:30 or 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, 2007, and I was at a party at the house of some friends, when the conversation shifted to New Year's resolutions. I mentioned that I never do them ... and then realized that this year I wanted to do one. With everything that had been going on in my life (and I'm a single parent with a full-time job who runs both a singing group and a large online writing group, so that is a lot), I hadn't been getting much writing done lately, despite my best intentions. So after thinking it through for a few minutes, I actually did make a resolution: I was going to write every day for 2008.

The rules were pretty lenient: there was no minimum length, and the writing could either be generating new material or making at least sentence-sized changes to existing material. However, all of the writing had to be for publication: no journal entries, blogs, etc. would count.

So I started. It was awkward at first. It would get to be time to go to bed, after a day full of things to do, and I'd realize that I hadn't written yet--so I'd sit down, chip away at making meaningful edits on some piece I wanted to get out the door for just 10 or 20 minutes, then turn the computer off and head to bed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had cleared out all of the projects that I felt were overdue and needed immediate attention and was able to get back on track with a novel I was working on.

This was more difficult. I wasn't entirely clear on where I was going with the novel, and because I was getting in my writing time late in the day, I really didn't feel like spending some time planning the story, then spending more time writing the story. So I tried just writing, an approach that has worked well for me some of the time before. Within a few weeks, it was clear I was driving myself through a trackless wilderness. Just Writing might work for me for some projects, but this one required a lot of thought and planning to come off well, and it wasn't working out. I began working on another project instead, one that I knew was more straightforward and would come out more easily.

But thinking back on that experience, I soon realized that I needed to change my resolution: my writing time could be for writing an actual piece, but it could also be for planning a piece, in writing (daydreaming and straight research wouldn't count).

Feeling I had gotten off track with the novel I had been "just writing," I set it aside and got to work on a new project, one that required a lot of brainstorming, imagination, ideas, and planning--and I've been working on it every day since. What I've found is that my brain has gotten fired up with the story, and since I don't take more than a day away from the old story forge at a time, the coals are still hot when I next get back to them, and just need me to blow across them a little for the flame to leap back up. This is <i>much</i> better than writing from a cold start: this is jumping into the saddle and having the horse break into a gallop.

Writing every day has become easier since I started, and I've found more opportunities to do it. So far, one quarter of the way through 2008, I've missed one day (when I was both sick and on vacation). As nice as perfection is, missing one day is fine for me. If I miss one day per quarter for the whole year, I'll consider that a massive victory.

And there have been more benefits, surprising ones. I find that before I go to sleep or when I'm driving, I'm working on the book in my mind: I've obtained a limited amount of that enviable obsession that produces idea after idea, insight after insight, into a project. I'm re-reading a favorite writing book at night now (Donald Maass' <i>Writing the Breakout Novel</i>, which I recommend highly), and as I go through it, I find myself easily able to see how Mr. Maass' insights can apply to my book, and what I need to do. The characters are getting richer and more human, the plot more surprising and satisfying, the milieu more real and engrossing.

So here's my advice to you: if you're serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don't have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead--just for a month or two--writing every day. Don't set high word count requirements, but follow your regime faithfully. What's interesting is that your work may change not just in the quantity of words you've generated, but in the way it feels to you to write it. After the first couple of months, writing for me began to feel effortless again, something I had only seen occasionally in the past and that I now suspect had more to do with having gotten into a habit of writing very regularly for a while than with some particular inspiration.

I'm not the first person to try this by any means. Some writers--even other when-I'm-not-at-my-day-job-or-with-my-family writers, like me--have made it a permanent part of their lives, as I may come to do as well. A whole group of us on Codex, my writing group, are doing this. Lots of other people are first. Lawrence Schoen (Codexian, fluent Klingon speaker, and author of a variety of clever short stories published in English and translated into a passel of other languages) started doing it back in 2006 or 2007.

And what about your writing? Would it help you?

Titles can benefit a story in as many as five meaningful ways, only one of which is based on having read the story already. Therefore it tends to be a bad idea to use a title that becomes interesting only after reading the story (e.g. "Charlie"). In no particular order, titles can (and arguably should):

1. Intrigue someone into being curious about the story ("Something Wicked This Way Comes," The Da Vinci Code).

2. Give the reader an immediate and accurate sense of what kind of story is coming in terms of genre, mood etc. (I, Robot, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

3. Serve as an easily-remembered and easily-communicated label for the book when telling others about it (Dune, The Hobbit). An easily-communicated title is easy to remember, spell, and say, and is strongly connected to the story itself. It stands out: you remember it specifically rather than something like it.

4. Lend a sense of authority or poetry ("To the East, a Bright Star," The Once and Future King).

5. Be unlikely to be confused with other titles. This particularly makes one-word titles problematic unless the word is extremely unusual (Xenocide).

Caveats:

Ÿ         These rules don't apply in the same way to movies, in part because there are only a very limited number of movies out at a given time and most interested consumers are exposed to a poster and/or trailer for each, making the title less important except for item #3.

Ÿ         Also, many very successful books have "broken" these rules, because of course the book itself is more important than the title.

Ÿ         And of course it's debatable how many people will actually be influenced in any way by a title if they don't have another recommendation for the book. That said, some readers are intrigued by titles, and a title can be the difference between your book being looked at on a shelf or within online search results or disregarded with the all the other books the reader has never heard of.

Many writers, from beginners to established pros, seem to want to come up with titles that cleverly cap off or sum up the story. They'll write a story about a magical cape and call it "The Cape," or a story in which the secret is that the protagonist is really dead and call it "Unsettled." These types of titles often lose the opportunity to ensnare the reader's interest and advertise what they're about.

Titles are much more important for books than for short stories, since a person who is browsing for a book online or in a bookstore, or who glimpses the title in a list, has the opportunity to find out about the book and perhaps buy it. Short stories, by contrast, are usually available only in groups within magazines, anthologies, and collections, and so individual titles are unlikely to have much opportunity to attract readers to buy the work.

In terms of learning to write good titles, I highly recommend exercising this part of your brain wherever possible by using good titles for e-mail subjects, forum discussion titles, boring reports you put together for work, etc. It's a rare situation where anyone will be bothered by you slapping a magnificent title on an otherwise dull report or a quick e-mail, and the more you work to come up with titles the stronger that facility will be.