The First Five Words

In 2000, Literary Agent, Noah Lukeman wrote The First Five Pages. In this thin little gem on writing, he said that if the first five pages didn’t hold the reader, it was bye bye book.

I believe that even before you get to the first five pages, you must be grabbed by the title. When I browse a bookstore (the ones that are still are business) or surf online for a new book, the title is what captures my attention. (The book cover design is also important, but I’ll leave that for another blog.)

Let’s peruse the market to see what I mean. Some book titles say it loud and clear and leave you with no doubt what the book is about. David McCullough is a good one for non-fiction: 1776, John Adams, The Johnstown Flood, Truman. No question about what the subject of each book is. Even novels can be pretty straight forward – the title hints at the story, although often more subtly. Interview With a Vampire is just that.  The Affair, Hostage, even The Patriot gives you a hint about the novel’s plot.

Some books on writing use clever titles to attract you, but you still know what kind of advice they’re going to offer. Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, and i never metaphor i didn’t like by Dr. Mardy Grothe both use humor and a play on words to get their subjects across.

Humorous titles are a great gimmick to attract people to your book, but only if the book lives up to the humor. For those Catholic readers, this may resonate: Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? by John Powers. I’m not even going to touch that one.   How about this: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James Loewen. Lies about anything always pique the imagination.

Here are a few titles that caught my attention while I was researching my books. The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War by Thomas P. Lowry, M.D. Another universal topic of fascination – sex.

When I was researching my book on the Salem witch trials, I ran across this one and laughed out loud. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England by Bruce Daniels. Kind of an oxymoron. Still, I bought it and the book was incredibly interesting and helpful. Had the title been just the second part without “Puritans at Play,” I’m not sure I would have noticed it.

There are the titles that use seductive, albeit overused, words like “code,” “enigma,” “paradigm,” “dilemma” to proclaim a mystery or a conspiracy is hiding between the jacket covers.  Think The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.

Other techniques. Robert Bloch’s Psycho hits you in the face with images of a mad man or woman, while Baldacci’s Absolute Power makes you think – who has the power, why, how, what does he do with it? As you read, the title becomes clearer and clearer until, whack, it too, hits you in the face.

Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City is a beautiful play on words. Black against white, good against evil. In Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, she captures the spirit of one man, a World War II hero, in one powerful word.

My first book, The Triangle Murders began its life as Tenement. When my critique group suggested I come up with something a little more mystery-genre rather than literary since the story is about murder, arson, and foul play. So, I went with a simple “murders” using the name of the factory that formed the backdrop, The Triangle.

When I worked on my Civil War mystery, myriad plot elements fought for the title: different time periods, history, forensics, photography- both civil war and digital, massive conspiracies, and so on. It took a while, but Time Exposure was the result.

My next book, due out in the spring, was originally titled Provenance and posed a challenge. It’s about the Nazi confiscation of art and a missing Van Gogh painting (in actuality still missing.) I thought Provenance was perfect, until it dawned on me that not everyone would be familiar with the word. They might think it was a city in Rhode Island or the end of Cape Cod.  Good grief.  Plus the word might conjure up “art” but not necessarily mystery or murder. So I changed the title to Deadly Provenance. Will it work?

You tell me.