How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Ryan Elizabeth Penske's website.
The title of my novel, The Dreamers, relates directly to a specific element of the story. Not only are the characters constantly dealing with the notion of dreams, thinking about dreams and what they mean, but they are also actively dreaming and in a dream state quite a lot throughout the novel. The characters who are able to dream figments of the future are also called “Dreamers” by staff that work in The Dreamers main setting of the novel, The Manor de Reves.
I write a lot of stuff, whether that be for my masters program or creative work, and I always find the title to be the last thing I think of or come up with. I think the “meat” of the work has to come first to then inform the author on what a piece should be called. I think if you title something first, very rarely will the title from the very beginning stay the same. With my novel The Dreamers however, I had enough of the premise and concept of the actual Dreamers in my story figured out, that from opening the first word document I ever began writing the story in, I titled it The Dreamers. Luckily for me it stuck, and everyone who read it including my editor and publisher liked it.
In general, I think a title should reflect the most important part of your story. It doesn’t have to be something blaringly obvious or spoiler-y, but I think what is the most cool is when a story has a title that allows for the readers to have an “ah-hah” moment and connect/understand the title once they get to a certain point in the story. I recently had this experience with...[read on]
Q&A with Ryan Elizabeth Penske.
--Marshal Zeringue
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