A Quote by Howard Jacobson
I normally take a long time finding titles. I finish the book and go into sweats for months afterwards trying to think of them.
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I look for interesting titles that are curious and make people think. A lot of people are always so caught up in their lives. But if I make them smile through my titles or provoke them a little bit then maybe they will think about things and read the book and take something away from it.
Titles are very hard. Sometimes a title comes before I start to write the book, but often I finish the book and I still don't have a title. I have to go through the book again and then sometimes I hope a title jumps out at me from what I've written.
It took me months and months to get back to normalcy - to have a glass of wine at dinner, to go out to a movie with my wife. Just those normal things that you take for granted I wasn't able to do for a long time.
I am not like Stephen King, who writes one book, then writes another. I finish a book and go off and... look for wrecks. Then, six months later, I might start another book.
Even when you think you can detach yourself from the characters, you don't. Because you're spending so much time trying to realize this person and make them real that they do infect you, in a way. And you do take them home and live with them, even if you think you're turning the character off. But in order to pull off a role convincingly, you wind up thinking about that person all the time, and it does sort of creep into you. And then there are things that you'll respond to, or react to in a very different way than you would normally.
If a champ has to take a long layoff then I think that's the only time interim titles should be introduced to the division.
I think titles are tricky because they're like a really short ad for the book. And like an ad, they should open the door in a way that might be more accessible than the book itself. So I always like titles to be familiar. I'm not trying to break ground with the title itself. The title should feel like something already celebrated.
It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will.
There were a couple of months when I was approaching graduation where I started to think of graduating from college as the afterlife. Because it's this kind of crazy thing that you always know you're going to finish school inevitably, but nobody ever really tells you what happens afterwards.
I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.
I think Hemingway's [book] titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway's success. His titles have a life of their own, and they have enriched the American vocabulary.
And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally.
I always want to live long enough to finish the book I'm working on and see it published. But then I start another book before the previous one is in the stores, so I always have a reason to go on.
Take your time, however long the book needs. I've seen a lot of promising careers go into decline because writers succumbed to the pressure to write faster than was comfortable for them or the story.
Every other day I read a book. It takes me two days to finish a book. I like reading because if I'm not doing anything, then I read. If my mom tells me to go take out the trash, I'll go take out the trash, and come back and start reading again.
You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.
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