How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Danila Botha's website.
A Place for People Like Us was actually a very hard title to choose, which isn’t usually the case for me. Often the title comes to me relatively early, and I use it to frame the story as I go through each draft. For example, before I’d even written the title story in my short story collection, For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, I knew the kind of story I wanted to write, and that it would capture the theme of love lost in the collection. In this case, the original draft was told from both Hannah’s and Jillian’s points of view. I was listening to a lot of Fiona Apple at the time, and she has this amazing song, "Fast As You Can," with lyrics that go “oh darling/ it’s so sweet/ you think you know how crazy/ how crazy I am.” How Crazy I Am was an early title I considered, but I worried that it both trivialized mental health struggles and was reductive, because both women are so much more complex. Another title I considered was The World Is Dead and I’m Full of Joy, which comes from...[read on]
Writers Read: Danila Botha (May 2011).
Q&A with Danila Botha.
--Marshal Zeringue
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