A Midsummer Night’s Blog

In anticipation of the inevitable question – what could have possibly prompted this unprecedented mid-year blog entry? – I am actually going to dedicate the entire first three paragraphs of this post to explaining why on this night of all nights I have decided to write.

In a nutshell, I have decided that if I truly want to do justice to my undergraduate degree in English & Creative Writing and also ultimately pursue a career as a writer someday, then I must start to produce more than one piece of writing per annum. Plus we canceled our HBO and Grey’s Anatomy (which yes I still watch, two words: Jesse Williams) is a rerun.

Now, to any readers out there who may also happen to be my employer or my financial advisors (Bob & April Rinder), no I am not quitting the day job just yet. I have a long way to go before I can move beyond the “aspiring” stage and into full-fledged (read: paid) writerdom. Authorship? Regardless, I am resolved to try.

The hardest part about writing for me has always been titles. I feel, as do many would-be aspiring writers, a great deal of pressure to come up with truly brilliant titles. A brilliant title is not only an enticement for people to read your work, but sometimes, if a title is brilliant enough, it will actually convince them the writing is good. On top of that, a brilliant title will make your work memorable to your readership. It may even prompt readers to promote your writing to their friends and associates. With a little bit of luck, a brilliant title could ultimately result in an exchange like the following:

Reader: I read a good piece of writing the other day.
Friend/Associate: Oh really? What was it called?
Reader: Silhouettes.
Friend/Associate: Ooh great title. What’s it about?
Reader: …um… shadows.
Friend/Associate: Who wrote it?
Reader: No clue.

Because of this tremendous importance of titles, and because I am a procrastinator in the purist sense of the word (see: annual blog postings on December 31st), I invariably leave them for last. In college, my approach for academic paper titles was generally to come up with some play on words or overused cliché (and no, in this case you will see that is actually not an oxymoron) and then add a lengthy and dramatic subtitle that still failed to give any indication of what the paper was actually about. Some examples include:

Shattered Expectations:
The Inconsequence of Ending in Dickens’ Novel

The Inexhaustible Well:
Deepening the Experience of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas

Happily Ever After:
Re-imagining Jane Austen’s Emma into Film

Embracing the Savage:
The Triumph of Human Physicality in Orwell’s 1984

I mean I could go on. (For those of you who will appreciate, I did not even dig into the IHUM archives yet…) Anyway, it is clear from the above that the thesaurus was my good friend and constant companion in those days (read: early mornings of the day the paper was due).

For my fiction writing classes, however, I took it to the next level. Because as important as titles are for academic papers, the professor has to read them or at least pretend to in order to assign a grade. For fiction, however, a bad title can kill a story before the reader makes it to page one.

For creative work, therefore, I relied on the brilliance of the words themselves. I came up with what I considered to be a truly awesome word, and then would go to great lengths and artistic sacrifice to somehow weave that word into a critical part of the story (which was at this point written in its entirety and probably due in 20 minutes somewhere on the other side of campus). I picked titles like Etchings, Castaways, Lighthouse, and Silhouettes (you may have heard of it). I once went so far as to choose a girl’s name that I thought was particularly poetic and then proceeded to rename my main character Chloe (thank god for find/replace).

Ironically enough after what I have just shared, I came up with the title of this blog before I had a clue what I was going to write about. It just seemed fitting as I walked home on a warm July evening, intent on blog-writing. It is also a terrible play on literary greatness that is too often clichéd, making it the obvious choice for yours truly.

And yet if you will indulge me for another few paragraphs, I shall attempt to insert meaning where before there was only shoddy wordplay.

A wise friend recently told me that one of the keys to making a goal (read: dream) become a reality is to talk to people about it. The simple but ingenious reason being that once people know you have a goal you are working toward, unless they are forgetful or assholes, they will probably ask you about it the next time they see you. And if you continuously have nothing to share and no progress to report, you’re going to start to feel like a bit of an asshole yourself. You will also lose all credibility as a dream-haver.

So to you my loyal readership, I am entrusting my dream. Or at least this blog. It is now your duty (unless you are forgetful or an asshole) to continue the conversation. Not only do you remain obligated to read whatever I manage to post, you must also heckle me to produce more and better writing. Possibly even other kinds of writing that don’t rely solely on sarcasm and self-depreciation.

And also titles. I really must work on those titles.